The Ready Writer

2017 was a...rough year.  BUT there were a lot of good stories to come from it, so in no particular order, here were my favorite stories of 2017.  We'll start with the Podcasts: I know I've mentioned this podcast before , but it remains one of the best stories I've ever listened to. It made me laugh, cry, and just generally FEEL (which was hard to do in the numbing shock that was 2017). Even though this is nonfiction, it still influences me and helps me to think about the ways in which to tell a good story.  Told in a similar way as S-Town, Dirty John is an episodic (but limited) nonfiction podcast.  It is about love, deception, forgiveness, denial, and pretty much every other feeling you could feel. You can listen to the destruction that John Michael Meehan causes as the podcast or you can read about him on the LA Times website .  The podcast isn't quite as...lyrical? Poetic? as S-Town, but it's content will make you want to binge it. You...

I really think that in order to write productively you need to have your own space. Maybe your space is the couch or at a specific table at your favorite coffee shop, or locked in the bathroom while your kids are screaming on the other side of the door. That’s okay. You don’t need to have an office to write. This is my space: Sure the furniture is mismatched, and the view isn’t great, and it needs some better storage (and a good vacuuming and dusting) but it’s mine. I can go in there and close the door and write. I can make it smell however I want, I can organize the furniture however I want and I can put whatever I want on the walls. It. Is. Mine. And I hope to use it a lot more in 2018. I spent a ton of time in there during my grad school years doing work and writing papers, but I haven’t done a ton of creative work in there. My resolution is to change that. Words will be written in there. My words. Memento mori &;

I've been thinking a lot lately about creative nonfiction - and that's probably due to the fact that for the first time in 7(?) years, I have been inspired by people.  Real life people. I took my first creative nonfiction class in community college because it was a term I had never heard before.  How on Earth could an essay be creative? But it opened up this new world to me, a world of memoir and a level of thought that I needed and ended up thriving on. the first creative essay I wrote landed me a spot reading in a swanky art gallery surrounded by middle aged, well dressed academics drinking wine (which was, and still is my measurement of success). I continued taking creative nonfiction as a writing major at Southern Oregon University. I got A;s, I was told I could easily be a biographer or a memoirist, or essayist writing for any number of journals, and yet, for some reason, I stopped. I attended Grad School where I studied Library Science, not just because I wanted to b...

Get ready folks, this is gonna be kind of a long one. Also, for those who only prefer to read about my writing and not so much my political and spiritual life, scroll down.  I'll get there eventually. So I've been thinking a lot about water lately.  My dreams have been full of it, I've been drinking a lot of it, and since it's January in Oregon, there's just a lot of it around. Water has a lot of symbolism. America's new President was sworn in earlier this week and as it was happening, it started to rain.  Many people thought it was a sign from God.  A positive thing.  Of course the reason behind this wasn't something divine.  It has to do with precipitation and clouds, I remember at least that much from public school science class (I also did an interpretive dance about the water cycle in Outdoor School when I was in 6th grade). But even so, the first thought I had was a divine one.  I thought about John 11:35: "Jesus Wept." Counter th...

I can't believe it is time for another writing update! I hate to say, but I've been in sort of a slump.  I haven't worked on my main project in a few weeks, and I've been writing sporadically on a short story in 50-100 word chunks. Part of it is because I'm working a lot, so I just write when I can squeeze in a few moments, and its easier for me to work on my short story in tiny chunks than my main project. But another part of it is because I'm just...tired. Between my 2 jobs I've been working full time, and when you work one job that you hate, and another job that you feel stuck in, it feels like a LOT more than 40 hours, and all of that leads to writing resistance. At the beginning of the year, I did a tarot card spread for myself and it told me that the one thing that will make this year successful for me is moderation.  For me, this doesn't necessarily mean cutting out things that I want to do, but rather it means allowing myself to not do ...

So I am still on hiatus from my main project, but that doesn't mean I'm not writing. In order to keep my horror writer brain sharp, I am doing the following: Working on my "affair" or "backburner" project .  This allows me to distance myself from my main project so that I can come back to it ready to edit critically (and next week I'll talk about what those edits will entail). Reading.   I'm a firm believer (but not the only one that believes it) that in order to be a good writer, you have to be a good reader (and by good, I mean participating in the act of those activities). So I am reading a lot of horror and seeing what the greats (as well as the newbies) are doing in the world of horror.  If you want to see what I'm reading, you can friend me on Goodreads.  You can find me under my full name: Brystan Strong. Research. This may fall into both the previous category and the next one, but I'm doing scholarly research on the genr...

Hello Readers! I know I have been gone for a little bit, but I was on vacation!  I had brought devices to blog as I was there, but then decided once I was on my vacation that I would enjoy being with loved ones and not worry about blogs or even writing.  So this post is sort of going to be a quick 3 for 1 blog post: Stats, Writing stuff, and Faith. I won't go into specific writing stats for the week of May 30-June 4 but here are some major updates: I typed up Chapter 2 of my Haunted House project.  The chapter itself is 1667 words but I want my chapters for that project to be 2000 to 2500 words so I have some work to do on that chapter. I also did some more work on the handwritten draft of Chapter 2 of my Haunted Hotel piece, but haven't finished chapter 2 or anything. There will be NO stats blog tomorrow, as I didn't really do much writing over my vacation.  The only writing I did do was on a short story.  The prompt was given to me from a fun fact th...

I'd like to take some time here and chat about WHY I write and how I came about being brave enough to call myself a writer. I've been writing my whole life.  I remember writing stories as a young kid.  I had Barbies, but rather than play with them, I would dress them up, and then write stories about them.  I was also in love with dinosaurs.  A lot of my stories revolved around a paleontologist type character (who just so happened to resemble me...a lot) who somehow brought dinosaurs back to life and was friends with them. Later, I wrote angsty teen fiction and poetry, which isn't unusual for most teens, and was often a reflection of the types of things I was feeling inside.  Writing was therapy. Writing was a hobby.  Writing wasn't a job. I wanted to be a paleontologist, a counselor, a teacher, a librarian.  I never wanted be a writer.  Being a writer wasn't a real job.  But it was always something I did.  I took creative writi...