Write 31 Days- Day 21 Creativity and the Secret Squirrel

This is kind of an odd blog entry because I spent the majority of the day (minus an exciting trip to the legal office to update our wills) creating something I'm working on that's, well....a secret.

Like many creative people I have multiple outlets for my creativity: as a maker, a video series host, as well as a writer of the more technical side of that creativity. But I'm also a writer of the purely creative variety; a world filled with situations and people that are both fantastic as well as boringly ordinary. I don't write in a genre where "anything goes" as some have the luxury of doing, but in a world bound by the reality a person of similar upbringing would easily recognize. IF situation X were to happen, a large group of people would reasonably expect A, B, and C to follow.

The rub is trying to weave those expected reactions into a story line that makes you want to turn the page. The challenge is to have the situation evolving in a way that makes you NOT want to put the book down when it's time to get the kids from school. Creativity tasked to the max. Does it hook you or not? How hard (or easy) it is for a test reader to walk away from it when you tell them supper is ready?

Try it. Come up with a tale of some sort and get it on paper. It doesn't have to be terribly long but can you get it to a point where you think "This will get them!" and hand it to that person 5 minutes before supper. Tell them they have 5 minutes (make sure you don't give them something that takes 3 minutes to read) and then see if they're late. Or if they come and start asking you questions, looking for more info you didn't feed them in those pages.

Just a thought.


Be creative folks.

Write 32 Days- Day 19 Gibberish

It feels as if I've always been on this island. Fleeting thoughts of friends, loved ones...I catch them out of the corner of my eye. I hear voices I do not recognize, smell perfume that is familiar yet strange. I know this is what happens when you're alone, but knowing doesn't make it better. It only lets you know how bad it's going to get.

I've gotten myself into a pickle. I under-cooked something and spent the past two day laying in my shelter trying to dehydrate myself from either end. There's no wind, so the sweat stays where it wells up from inside. I stopped sweating. That's when I knew I had to get up. Months upon months here and I have sweated every moment. When you stop sweating, you die. I don't want to die. Not here. Not like this.

I would like to die in a bed laying on crisp cotton sheets, a down duvet folded neatly at my feet. Tickled by waves of air dropping in rhythm from the ceiling fan. Droplets of water running down a glass of ice water within easy reach. A Bible on my chest, making me feel my breaths become slow and shallow. Slower and shallower. Then gone. Happy.

But I'm here. Crusted from the havoc my body has wrought because of some invisible bug in my gut. Frazzled because I don't have a razor and my skin is raw and oozing under the damned beard. My feet are raw from wading in the cove trying to find a fish to eat then they're sliced by the thorns and  shells and rocks. My gums bleed, my fingers bleed. My lips are split and chapped. It's hard to see at night and I have a headache. This ever-present headache that makes doing anything impossible and doing nothing unbearable.

I do not want to be like this. I am alive but not among the living. I have thought of a million ways to end it, to be done when I say I'm done. Not when the island beats me down to the last stinking breath.

I will not. For when I die, it will be on cool sheets, dusted by a breeze, water by my side and a Bible on my chest.

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And that's what you do when you have to post on creativity and the day has been nothing but putting out fires caused by people other than yourself.

Be creative kids