March 2012
17 posts
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NSTF Prompt III
Writing club’s five-minute prompt this week was “the letter never arrived.”
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The letter never arrived. It was likely lost at sea, or else the footman surrendered it along with his head at the revolutionary encampment along the Seine. But in any case Whitman had no way of knowing he wasn’t to return to Paris that summer, for Marie had been turned out to the pirates in...
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It was a really exciting meeting. →
Ultimately, Evanston voters declined to invest in a neighborhood school for the minority-majority Fifth Ward.
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“One of her editors, every Thursday night, would drink an entire bottle of...”
– Newsroom Talk
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"Hooking up, Falling for"
The truth is, all you need to write an extraordinary story is to take the ordinary things that happen to you and exaggerate poetically.
For example,
“Shit, she’s obsessed with a straight girl.”
could just as easily be:
“I desperately want to make love to this Peruvian saleswoman of gigantic bars of soap, but she’s got no love left for me.”
Now which story...
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Sketch
Walking down Quincy Avenue with my head down, shoulders hunched against the bitter winter wind, I barely saw the city passing by for all the woolen layers, cashmere blinders to the world I wore like a second skin.
Standing at the intersection of five-star valet dining and subway sewage, I ignore the clink of coins rattling against each other in paper cups that call out, “Spare a meal,...
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Never Going To Sleep
It’s been a lovely week of near-summer weather, vegan lunches with upper management, walks by the lakeshore, free Americano from Kafein, Jekyll and Hyde playing on a loop, trips to esoteric bookstores, drunken stumbling down the streets of Evanston, Talking Pictures, high-brow entertainment at Navy Pier, low-brow laughs with co-workers, midnight conversations about fetishes, frogurt and...
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Charity Navigator: Your Guide to Intelligent... →
The world is up in arms over KONY 2012 right now. Not to endorse any particular side to the Invisible Children debate, I just want to say the original 2003 documentary is extremely powerful and worth a viewing.
As a journalist, I sincerely believe only good can come out of raising awareness and motivating discussion. But too often people are so desperate to align themselves with a certain...
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NSTF Prompt II
Writing club’s prompt of the week was to use these eight words in a story of 300 words or less: dinosaur, red wagon, nymphomaniac, red velvet, spray paint, architectural, battleaxes, fingernail. After five minutes, I only managed three, but whatever.
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Mary who towed her Fisher Price red wagon continuously around the block on Friday afternoons when her mother entertained her very...
yourotherboyfriend asked: Uhm... Magical realism??
wonderlines asked: yes, because she knows she needs that pain he causes her to create cool shit.
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WatchHaving lived a summer beside the Suzhou River, I would just like to say that although it’s far cleaner now, mermaids would never want to swim in it.
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Excerpt
Archetypal city scene-setting, based largely on this Hyde Park/Shanghai hybrid of my imagination.
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Bensonhurst was an analogous neighborhood as ever there was one. Along the route they walked each day, Roman recognized the residences of politicians and movie stars, gangbangers, university students and corporate warlords all situated within sugar-borrowing distance of each other. Where one red,...
