Inspiration is easy; it’s the perspiration you’ll have to work for when crafting your fiction. And Mighty Mur is proving it with her latest project, The News from Poughkeepsie. She is blogging an idea a day for a year to make a point: Don’t worry about people stealing your IDEAS.

She may use some of the ideas herself for her own fiction, but you can do the same for yours. Feel free to feed her fiction fodder to your famished muse. (Say that three times without tangling your tongue and I’ll KNOW you’ve had your coffee already.)

The only cost: Mention where you got the idea and link back to the blog post where you found the idea. The price is right!

She began on April 22. See her archives so far here, and subscribe to the whole Murverse feed here to get more, effortlessly.

Photo credit: Striatic

Technorati Tags: fiction writing, Murverse, Mighty Mur, Mur Lafferty, story ideas, inspiration

There’s a fellow who began a deceptively simple exercise of blogging just 40 words — his age at the time — every day for a year, beginning the x365 project. During the process, he captured candid impressions of people who mattered in his life.

I decided to do the same. The discipline of writing shorter when you want to wax eloquent is a useful exercise in word selection, pacing, restraint, and vivid writing. I opted to publish the series on my other blog, CarolynBahm.com, mainly because the essence of those posts for me is the vivid memory, not the craftsmanship of the writing. You can check out my progress so far at this link to my 47×365 category.

You may want to try it out yourself for a zippy little writing project. The hardest part is making the list of 365 people. Even though the list doesn’t have to be exclusively of life-changing characters — it can include peripheral contacts too — I currently have fewer than 200 on my list. So it’s helping me pay more attention to the people around me, and I’m adding daily.

I think I’ll add to my list the nice middle-aged woman who has a brilliant smile that lights up her eyes and transforms her plain face, making my breakfast stops at the local Burger King such a pleasant spot in my morning.

Technorati Tags: writing exercise, x365, 47×365

[Note: This is cross-posted on my personal diary/Mommy blog, CarolynBahm.com.]

Tomorrow is Read and Comment Day, as proclaimed by social media guru Chris Brogan. Go forth and drop a comment on some of the blogs you adore.

I’m as guilty as the rest of ya — I’m subscribed to more than 200 blogs and read them all regularly, but I only comment when something really tickles my fancy. Tomorrow, I’m going to work at getting my fancy tickled. (Gee, that sounds filthy.) And I’m going to try to make the comments more than just a litany of “Cool! Me too! LOL!” if possible … although even that is usually welcomed because it’s nice just to know that you’re not blogging in a void.

ANYWAY. As Chris suggests for your blog drive-bys, “Contribute to their conversations. Find some good stuff and add to it.” Then we’re to pop back to his post on this topic and report our good deeds. :o)

Technorati Tags: Read and Comment Day, blog comments