Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. -- Gene Fowler

Monday, March 8, 2010

Sunday writing chat on Toasted Cheese

I decided to try to take part in Toasted Cheese's weekly IRC chat this Sunday. I'd dropped in before and the people there seemed friendly and at least a little silly, so it felt like a nice place to be. The chat takes place at 1pm Eastern (10 am Pacific). During the chat, three different writing prompts are given out, and you're to write on each for ten minutes. The writing spurts are interspersed with chat so that the whole thing reaches an hour, more or less.

It's a good exercise to get my writing brain going on a Sunday, a day I'm usually not thinking a lot about my writing and am doing other, usually frivolous things, instead. I turned out two bits of prose, one an odd conversation between two people looking up at the clouds and pondering immortality, and the other a stab at a story idea I had the other day, written from the opposite end of the story than what I'd anticipated. Participants in the chat are encouraged to post their writing to the Toasted Cheese forums, and it's vaguely possible I might even do that at some point this week. Bravery permitting.

Apologies for the lightness of this post: this week promises to be full of Crazy Busy Stuff I Don't Really Want To Have To Do But I Have To Do It Anyway, so I'm going to do my best to get the week's posts scheduled out... today. *headdesk* We'll see how well that plan works out.

I'll leave you with a quote on writing: "Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals." -- Don DeLillo

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