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RemovedDec 24, 2021·edited Dec 24, 2021
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Oh dear. I hit the wrong button and the thing is published. To hell with it.

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"I made quilts as fast as I could to keep my family warm, and as pretty as I could to keep my heart from breaking."-- A Pioneer Woman's Diary.

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To be fair, Maugham and Forester are much better than anything streaming. Ashenden is still the standard of a late and slow gut punch.

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Chuck, when you talk about metaphor, how stories should explore a relatable metaphor to get the reader to connect on a deeper level, and make them cry by having a character point out all the memories he'll lose between two paddles, how do you define that word? Metaphor. Is it synonymous with theme?

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I don't think I can read The Great Gatsby again. I own a warped copy that I never returned when I was in high school since 2008. And there's two reasons why I have hard time reading that book. One, the language is often too pretentious-sounding for me to follow. And the other was about how it seemed like every dialogue attribution had an adverb. I'm kind of a stickler for that lol

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This was, oddly, a comforting thing to read in the middle of the night. Thanks.

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Your scattered mind always pulls it together, Chuck. Merry Deathmas, my friend. Thanks for your art all these years!

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Yeah, I think we're going to need you to share The Wreck of the F. Scott Fitzgerald now.

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Great stuff! Thanks for sharing the Fitzgerald trick you hinted at before!

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This is probably my favorite post so far. I’d asked a couple of questions about this and you hadn’t responded — but I took that as a cue that (hopefully) you’d be making a separate post elaborating more on this part of the process.

“Most of writing a first draft is the discovery of that broken heart. It’s only once we’ve discovered how the narrator’s heart was broken that we can go back and write a draft fully colored by that injury.”

Seriously might nail this to my wall or something as I put down my second story and go back to the first draft of my first story, now feeling less attached and rejuvenated; ready scrap what doesn’t fit and to cut and paste and sprinkle pain and joy together like peanut butter and jelly. The timing couldn’t be better. Best Christmas gift ever!

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Christmas alert. I've just posted my December short story. Wouldn't it be fun to cobble together an anthology of Christmas ghost/horror stories? THAT would be amazing. I'll contact LitReactor and see if they can help organize the effort.

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Chuck, I need your help remembering a quote from someone. You typed it in response to a comment and I don't know which post it's in. "Sex is good but sex with guilt is better."

Something to do with "sex with guilt." Do you know what quote I'm trying to remember?

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I’m currently writing a piece based on a story a friend told me over the holidays about him and his friends setting out to kill a lamb when they were teenagers in order to “eat what you kill” but ended up brutally suffocating the animal as they taped its mouth shut and threw it in the trunk and it choked on its own vomit by the time they reached the forest.

And I find this method very helpful in mixing and matching bits of the story with different Choruses like “curiosity killed the cat” or a La Haine style quote “did you hear the one about the guy who walked to Hell? He just kept walking through doors that read “heavens this way””

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