Tag: wine

  • Looking for a Christmas Drinking Buddy

    Merry Christmas? Why the hell are you reading this? Go spend time with your family!

    Unless you’re like me and alone for the holidays. Wow. That was depressing. Sorry. But then, if you’re sneaking on the internet when you should be having Christmas brunch with your parents, you deserve it. If you’re sitting by yourself, I’ve got a couple of bottles of wine in the fridge, come on over and we can split them.

    Ever since my parents’ divorce, scheduling holidays has been tricky. When I was still living at home, it was easier, because they lived about forty-five minutes away from each other, so I could feasibly see both of them for the day. Then I went off to college, and I purposefully chose a college that wasn’t close by to either of my family members. Suddenly I had to decide which parent to spend which holiday with. (more…)

  • Seriously, Try This at Home

    Sometimes external influences are awesome for writing. Sometimes they’re really not. Sometimes only in moderation.

    There are three things that do wonders for my writing ability when consumed in moderation:  caffeine, sugar, and alcohol. Of those three, caffeine has the most positive effect on me… it is also what I can have the most of before my story mutinies against me and my fingers vomit letters on the page—sometimes they even form words, even more rarely they form complete thoughts. That’s all provided that the shaking doesn’t do me in first and I don’t end up in the fetal position twitching. (more…)

  • Input/Output

    Just as writers get ideas from all around us, we also are influenced by everything we come into contact with. I dedicated a portion of my own personal blog entries to this phenomenon, which I affectionately call the Input/Output modes. Anything we take in inevitably affects what comes out.

    As a writer, I talk a lot about other writers and books that influence me, but sometimes I forget how much the other categories of art inspire me, as well.

    Music is a powerful one. When I listen to instrumental music, new worlds unfold inside my mind, and I envision scenes to fit with that music. When I was a kid, I used to lie in bed listening to my favorite movie soundtracks and make up new stories to go with them. Hell, I still do that sometimes. For some novels, I’ll create a Pandora station based around certain songs or bands for a certain mood. For others, I will pick one specific instrumental movie soundtrack and listen to it over and over, which shapes my story quite a bit, inspiring scenes I wouldn’t have otherwise fathomed.

    Visual arts – paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs – also trigger stories in me. I have always struggled with setting and description. I have a vague idea of what a person or place looks like, but the details are usually missing in my writing. Visual representations help me really consider the details.  Sometimes a picture will really speak to me and I’ll be driven to write a story that fits the scene. I’ll want to tell the story of how that domed city on the cliff came to be, or why the sky has inexplicable green miasma in it, or where that dragon got all of those books. Then characters will start to wander around inside the images to answer all of these questions for me.

    The arts aren’t the only other medium that influence my writing, however.

    (more…)