Cyborg Menagerie

I’m feeling a bit under the weather today (headcold impairing my brainzes) so I don’t have much in the way of stuff from my own head. So I figured I’d share this cool thing I received in my e-mail this weekend from Aniket who manages http://writeorama.com/

I am pleased to inform you that prompts are back on write-o-rama.

New authors appreciate any help they can get to promote their books.
To do our bit in helping with the promotion, we’ll be having a featured book by a newly published author every month.

The idea is to use the book title and cover as a prompt and write a story/poem in 500 words or less.
The author of the book will pick the winning entry and the winner would get a free copy of the book.

The featured book this month is ‘The League for the Suppression of Celery’ by Wendy Russ.

Do write to participate in the contest, and also help spread the word about new books by these awesome folks. Looking forward to your stories.

–Aniket, write-o-rama

Sounds pretty cool to me. I’ll definitely be taking part in writeorama, once I get my head cleared. I hope you do too.

I’ve been doing a bit of woodworking the past month, building a coffee table with a removable top for storing Lego and other toys. I’ve never done a major woodworking project in my life and certainly never built furniture. But the kids got a bunch of Lego for Christmas and I thought they needed a nice surface play on, so I figured why not. Also, Lego tables to purchase go for $100 at the cheapest. I figured I’d be able to make something for less than that.

My “workshop” isn’t much to speak of. I do my work in my basement, unorganized and chaotic. My tools have no home, really. They are on a pile in the floor. I had never used my table saw before this project.

However, if I decided I’d have to wait until I had a proper workshop I’d never built anything at all. You don’t need fancy tools to do something. YOU. JUST. NEED. TO. START. I started and this is what I accomplished:

Not perfect, but certainly not bad. Anyway, it’s the same with writing. You don’t need fancy toys. You don’t need that Macbook Air. You don’t need that beautifully large desk inside the rotunda of that gorgeous Victorian home. You don’t need absolute silence, or the kiss from a unicorn under a rainbow. To write all you really need is to begin.

It could be a napkin in the coffee shop. It could be the back of the mortgage bill while you are lying in bed, unable to sleep. It could be at your laptop on your lunch break at work. It could be any or none of these things, so long as you just write.

You don’t need a fancy desk. Heck, you don’t even need to know what you’re doing. I didn’t, and things turned out okay.