Later while alone it what I wanted when around Jeannie became clear. It went beyond her flesh, past the mere material -- just as how the story of a book is worth more than the ink and paper that contain it, 

I'd been daydreaming too much about my meetings with...

Many things I grew up being taught turned out to be backwards. Like the fear of dirt my mom instilled in me. I never actually feared dirt like I did monsters in the dark, but her binary way of treating dirt as something filthy like feces meant that I categorized...

A common pitfall in storytelling is not choosing to tell a story that leaves the character changed forever. I was sitting outside feeling summer breeze under a tree when this thought came to me:

We fear changing our characters forever because we fear it in our own lives. We want to...

Jeannie was talented. And incredibly beautiful. When such beauty is paired with even a modicum of talent the halo effect swindles you into hyperbolizing all non tangible assets about them. But no matter how much of that fallacy I was victim to, from an objective stance Jeannie Hammond just really...

Tim Subiaco will always be a legend to me. He was one of the rare members who wrote fiction everyday. Almost all the other people couldn't manage it. They either were like me and got stuck by the allure of writing the more easy nonfiction or they just stopped showing...

I joined  200WAD intending to write fiction. What got me into it was seeing people like Tim Subiaco writing a novella in public and being blown away. I'd never seen such a thing happening in public before and never had considered the possibility. Writing until then I'd always considered a...

The other day I felt just how old I was. In a major city I wouldn't be old, more middle aged for working at a media company, but at Balloon House I was definitely the boomer. Everybody else was either fresh out of college or still in it. Our budget...

It was after dropping off Sal for his afternoon Chemistry class that she had a day to spare. Just a few hours more honestly, but hours in the afternoon seemed to stretch on for her these days. Mornings and evenings would fly by but the liminal space of sunny, summer...

I never was jealous of an artist making it. Initially I saw this as a sign that I was a true artist. Now I think the opposite. 
 
A true artist hates to see another artist gain recognition while they remain in the shadows. My complacency with remaining in the...

There had been a time when I was throwing back cups of stale coffee at the diner thinking that I would one day become an artist. I mean I had already thought I was one but I what I was imagining was one day being somebody who got paid a...