writer at play
Posted in inspiration on Jun 30th, 2010
Last week, I highlighted our favorite picture book versions of fairy tales. This week I want to focus on what I truly love (more so than the originals)–fairy tale retellings! Robin McKinley’s Beauty is the first fairy tale retelling I ever read. I loved how it fleshed out details, made the characters easier to like [...]
Posted in creativity, inspiration on Jun 15th, 2010
Create a city skyline. Check here and here and here for cityscape projects for kids. Here are some skyline photos to get you inspired. Make a map of a city. This could be a street map, a subway map, the floor plan of a skyscraper or a museum. We made subway maps last week, featuring [...]
Posted in inspiration, short stories on Jun 6th, 2010
Miss M. and I are both fascinated by fairy tales. She likes them because they have princesses (and wicked stepmothers and princes and horses). I am intrigued by them, often not by what they contain, but what they leave out. Characters act illogically sometimes (Why did Snow White keep opening the door to peasant women [...]
Posted in creativity, inspiration on May 22nd, 2010
I was at Joann’s yesterday, looking for something to embellish my ATCs for the upcoming swap and ran across a pad of this absolutely glorious fairy tale-themed paper. It’s thick card stock, glittery, textured, visually stunning and I kept coming back to it to admire and touch and soak up. Oh, how I coveted that [...]
Posted in creativity, inspiration, linktopia on May 20th, 2010
My sister-in-law went to Tuscany and brought back pictures. Speaking of awesome landscape pictures, here’s yet another plug for one of my favorite love-to-gawk-at sites. Via SF Signal: 40 examples of stunning space art. These images make me feel awed, insignificant, and sometimes disturbed. The artists have captured the vast scale and gigantic grandeur of [...]
Posted in inspiration on Apr 29th, 2010
… all two days that are left of it, that is. I confess to not being much of a poetry reader as an adult. I was drawn to poetry as a child– as all children are– reveling in imagery and metaphor and wordplay and rhythm. I loved studying poetry in my English literature classes in [...]
Posted in inspiration on Apr 15th, 2010
1. Create a book trailer. Check out this workshop to get you started. 2. Make a character collage. I did this for a costume design class I took in college. We used scraps of fabric, ribbons and other embellishments to create an abstract collage for each character. Think of what colors and textures fit your [...]
Posted in inspiration, reading, reviews on Mar 11th, 2010
Play is something I’ve become in very interested in since having kids and ditched my left-brain-focused career plans for a more creative vocation (that would be writing stories *grin*). I picked “writer at play” for my tagline, not because I am a super-playful person but because I need the reminder to keep from turning the [...]
Posted in inspiration, linktopia on Feb 23rd, 2010
Djmills pointed me to this excellent workshop on creating book trailers at Happy Endings. The posts go up weekly, with three more to go. Check it out.
Posted in inspiration on Feb 3rd, 2010
1. Write a scene or a short story in a different genre. Take a stab at a mystery if you write literary fiction, try romance if you usually write military scifi. 2. Set a dialog-heavy scene (a couple arguing, the hero finally catching up to the villain who betrayed him) in an unusual locale (like [...]