Author: Shannon Turlington
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Book review: Everyday Writing
Everyday Writing: Tips and Prompts to Fit Your Regularly Scheduled Life by Midge Raymond Everyday Writing is a short e-book that promises to help people who want to write but who can never find the time. It’s divided into two parts. The first part offers tips to help readers start writing and keep writing. I…
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Famous Last Words
A question on Quora asked: What are the most famous final passages from books or stories? Here are my votes for the top five. Feel free to add your favorite last lines in the comments. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” — The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald “and yes I…
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A dystopia of our own making…
I recently was discussing with friends this new survivalist phenomenon. It is not so new, of course, but the meme that the apocalypse is coming soon has gone mainstream to an alarming degree, infecting people who otherwise seemed rational. Everyone seemed to know someone who had fully bought into the survivalist apocalyptic delusions that LaPierre…
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Is writing torture? Should it be?
I remember when writing used to be something I did solely for fun, when I would write just to play around with words. I created collage poems out of words and pictures cut from magazines. I tried to make up my own acrostics and crosswords. I wrote stories as a form of play — playing…
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Hitchcock films…
For Christmas, I got a great set of Alfred Hitchcock films, what I would consider to be his five best: Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, Rear Window, and North by Northwest. But of course, everyone knows these films. (If you don’t, you’ve got some watching to do!) After you’ve seen them, what next? This is what I would consider to…
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Walking the world wide web…
I published my first book 17 years ago. It was called Walking the World Wide Web, and it was an edited selection of all the best websites out there, with detailed reviews. It’s hard to believe now, but the web was so young in the mid-90s that it was possible to list a large percentage of the…
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The writer’s job…
The writer’s job is to entertain, but there is more. Writers can educate, enlighten, even corrupt. This is why books are often seen as dangerous. Writers are observers. They want to figure out what makes us human. Why do we behave the way we do toward one another? What is our purpose here? Is there…
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A writer’s trick…
I once heard a writer say in an interview that he always goes to a coffeeshop to write. This is because at home there are too many distractions. There are chores to be done, books to be read, snacks to be eaten and so on. But at the coffeeshop, while there are distractions, they aren’t…
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The end of the world as we know it…
On Quora, there are a lot of interesting responses to this question: Pandemics: If society started collapsing due to a global pandemic killing more than half of the world’s population within a year or two, what would you do when you realized what was really happening? – Quora. There are a number of detailed, well-thought-out answers…
Shannon Turlington 