I love Anne Lamott's writing on, well, writing (Bird by Bird), and so I found this essay by Maria Popova, commenting on Lamott's writing about routine and ritual, really resonated with me as a creature of routine myself.

Marking it down here so that I remember both to come back to it, and to try to track down the Lamott book mentioned...

The ( Read more... )

I just came across this moving blog post on BookTrust's website about the power of words - both reading and writing - to help us work through the most difficult times in our lives, and thought it might resonate with some of my flist as well.

( Read more... )

It's a glorious, crisp autumn morning, the morning chores are done, children chauffeured, I have Badly Drawn Boy on the speakers and coffee brewing....

... and fic mulling about in my brain. Feeling like writing for first time in months!  Even better, went back last night to look at the half-written Powers-verse piece I remembered starting back in ( Read more... )

So much for repeatedly insisting to altariel that no, I was not doing B2MEM this year, and no, I didn't care how fantastic the bingo prompts were, and no, I was not looking...

Four cards. Four. I just couldn't resist, the prompts look such fun. OCs, Last Lines, and Smells are all things with plenty of scope... but Poetic Forms? Ferheavenssake. I don't even ( Read more... )

Arrgh, why are titles always the hardest part of writing fic?

(Titling a piece has been known to take me longer than the piece itself, especially for drabbles.)

The latest ficlet from the Amid the Powers and Chances of the World-verse is done in draft, but can I title it? I want a quotation or a line of verse (not necessarily JRRT) about swords, or ( Read more... )

Found the two links below while poking about online last night looking for stuff on traditional fencing/sword-fighting, and found them so useful that I thought I'd share. A pair of essays on how to write a sword-fight, by a guy who is both a competition-level fencer and a professional writer; and has clearly thought quite a lot about the difference ( Read more... )

Continuing my intermittent programme of organising my tolkien_weekly drabbles among my stories on Henneth Annun Story Archive and Tolkien Fan Fiction (both in case LJ ever goes irretrievably belly-up, and because I know not all my flist read tolkien_weekly and have encouraged me to give a heads-up over here), we now have:

Season of Gifts (mostly Legolas and Gimli, one Arwen ( Read more... )

I decided it would be tempting fate to post a link to my Back to Middle-Earth Month 2011 passport before the month was over - I really hoped I was going to manage every day's challenge but didn't want to commit myself! So I've been keeping this entry under wraps till the challenge was completed and the mods had had time to update all the stamps... ( Read more... )

Today's Challenge:
"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." - Friedrich Schiller. Write a story or poem or create artwork that illustrates this quotation.

Rather to my amazement, this one fits with the place for today's challenge as well - Valinor!  And for once no Kleenex required! This would come somewhere around the middle of the ( Read more... )

Today's Challenge: "You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right." --Maya Angelou
Write a story or poem, or create a piece of art on the theme of leaving or returning home.

Then World Behind and Home Ahead

At last, when they think themselves forever lost, it happens. Gimli wakes one night with a sudden ( Read more... )