Even though I’m largely back to myself, albeit significantly changed by the last year, things still feel kind of stilted and off. Somehow, I never really recognize a depression cycle until I’m coming out the other end. And really, how did I not think that something like my father’s death would send me down a
When I was in my teens, I wrote poetry daily. Granted, most of it sucked. I was a very different person back then and my exposure to the world was limited to small-town upstate New York and my very religious mind-frame. But, that isn’t the point. The point was in the joy of just writing
It feels trivial somehow to talk about the mundane aspects of a mundane life when around the world people are suffering and dying in zones of war, bombs falling from the sky, buildings reduced to rubble and scared populations huddle in the dark or flee desperately to foreign lands. At the same time, for those
Have you ever woken up with your heart racing, sweat on your forehead, and anxiety riding you out of some nightmare that you can’t recall anything about? That was how today started. For the life of me, I have no idea what I was dreaming, but I woke up feeling like something or someone was
Sometimes, inspiration is hard to come by, and the imposter syndrome looms large. As I stare into this year with a big move on the immediate horizon and the terrifying prospect of searching for literary representation battling my desire to take my writing career in a forward direction (versus just going with what I know
I am in the process of edits, which means a lot of reading punctuated with spurts of writing/changing and a fair amount of admiration for writer-me who strung together some pretty decent words. My writing process goes a little something like this: Zero-Draft, just get the plot onto the page Character Study, get the details
Sometimes I come here knowing exactly what I want to write about. Other times, I don’t have a clue until I start writing. Today is the latter. I always come away from Sirens with new inspiration and this year that has become a series of character studies. I’ve always done them for my main characters,
So, where do the stories come from? What makes a good story? Or…what makes a story good? As with all art, it is up to the Reader to decide whether a story is good or not, and for many they can’t tell you why they feel that way. Some of us like to read dark,
I get asked fairly often how it is that I do what I do. For a long time I didn’t realize that not everyone has an endless loop of stories in their heads or characters that pull up a chair to have a chat. It seems inconceivable to me and I know that in those
Most weekends are set aside as time for writing/editing/other book related ings. Sometimes I dump several thousand words onto a page. Sometimes I strike a couple hundred off the page. Sometimes I tweak little things. But there also days when I research odd things, fall down a rabbit hole of baby names sites, draw (badly)
Natalie J. Case 