occasional posts by risa aratyr
Risa Aratyr The writing I did over the summer was big fun. Top of the list – my fiction. I was hoping to spend way more time on Shadow’s Road, but just thinking about the time I did spend on it makes me giddy-happy even now. Did a little writing on my newly-updated, just-gorgeous website over the … Read more Un-Fun Writing
Writing long-hand is an exercise in erasures or cross-outs, depending on whether pen or pencil is your instrument of choice. Long-hand lays waste to a lot of paper. Brilliant words have been irretrievably lost to long-hand; many a writer has erased faulty phrases or wadded up and tossed pages black with cross-outs, only to discover … Read more Back-Button Blues
“Putting pen to paper” has a ring to it, yeah? More than a nifty phrase, putting pen to paper is a sensuous experience; tactile, visual, olfactory, auditory. I love putting pen to paper, always have. Especially if it’s nice paper. Extra-especially if it’s the right pen. My pen-of-choice has a barrel that’s not too chubby, … Read more Putting Pen to Paper
That “first foray into fiction” I mentioned at the end of “Tools of the Trade, part iii” didn’t start out in a literary vein. It started out as a daydream. People daydream about movie stars, about living the good life, about wreaking righteous vengeance on the neighbor’s yapping dog … My daydreams were initially extensions of my … Read more The First Foray
I’m fed up with Bernie die-hards claiming the high revolutionary ground. Winning the White House isn’t the end-all/be-all of political change. Did the civil rights movement collapse with the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X? Was the Free Speech Movement silenced when police dragged Mario Savio from the podium in the Greek … Read more An Open Letter to the Bernie Faithful