occasional posts by risa aratyr
thoughts, news, and items of writerly interest
I’ve been erratically blogging at Neither Here Nor There since July of 2008. I’ve got four whole separate bodies of blog-work on this site: My Writerly Life (earliest incarnation, self-explanatory), WC Fields (World Cup 2010), Be-Coming Home (the journey from the fire that destroyed our home to our new home), and Write-Minded (my current offerings, … Read more Backtracking to Blog #1
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