YAY SO MANY THINGS IDEAS IDEAS LETS GO CREATIVITY ART AND ARTISTS DANCING THE WORLD NEW

Creation and Absorption Three

(Short Writing Resources Edition)

[oops i transferred this from my substack way late. please forgive me.]

Hiya! This’ll be a shorter entry to the ole newsletter because of, well, the day it is in the US. I got fambily to thank! And I bet you got folks to spend time with as well, so I shan’t take too many minutes from ya.

So I thought I’d give a short smattering of my favorite short writings (short stories, flash fiction, poetry, etc, misc). And resources on writing short things.

Anyways, above is a picture of a couple of my cats laying next to each other because they’re thanking each other or something.

THE NEWSLETTER PROPER

Creation

Here’s a fascinating article where a famed Polish poet answered a bunch of letters from people asking for poetry advice—except the original letters aren’t included. Only the answers.

Here’s a flash fiction prompt generator over on itch.io. It’s a delightful little thing that isn’t just random—it seems to be exclusively prompts that real people have written!

Finally, in the spirit of this post, here’s some flash fiction writing advice in 50 words:

  • Try weird things. Try fun things. Try scary things. Flash is the place to experiment. Just describe a lemon. Just write a man’s thoughts about walls. Bend fiction. If you hate it, keep it. Who cares? It’s just 500, 100, 50 words. The best part: you can always write more.

Absorption

Alrighty, here are my favorite short stories (as of yet (I will be reading many more)):

  • Story of Your Life (1998) by Ted Chiang - This is the my favorite short story. It explores linguistics and physics in a heart of a story wrapped tight in symbolic cords.
  • The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (1973) by Ursula K. Le Guin - A short story that’s more challenge to the reader than a story. A challenge about imagining utopia and our expectations of how it would actually work. Treat it like a one-way dialogue.
  • The Woman Who Went to Hell (c. 1885) by Patrick Minahan - FASCINATING! This is a wild folk tale from Ireland that mayyy be a very late evolution of the journey-to-the-underworld myth seen in so much of ancient mediterranean and near-east literature. Or maybe it’s its own thing, but whatever it is, it’s awesome.
  • Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor (c. 1900 BCE) by an unknown author - Also FASCINATING! An ancient Egyptian story about some guy who tells his tale of being stranded on an island with a giant snake god. You have to read it, and read it all the way through.
  • The Library of Babel (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges - More worldbuilding than story, but that does not lessen it any. A thought experiment of what a world would be like if it was just… a giant library. Explores how people tend to try extracting meaning from the random world.

And here are some of my favorite poems!! I’ll just let you read these because none are especially long.

Also, this little game/story/thing called void is an interesting use of the tool Twine, with themes of the divine and of being.

OTHER

uh What should I put here? Here’s an open-source stuff look-up tool from Creative Commons. I think you should use it for whatever articles/videos/games you make; or even better, make your own assets!!

The End

Alrighty, see ya in two weeks with a newsletter one can comfortable sink their teeth into, rather than this one that (uncharacteristically, for the day it is) is a mere bite, a single crunch, nothing to rest the teeth in.

Fare thee well!!