Outlandish But Beautiful

A journey to the center of the Earth by be*curious, via Flickr - France / Languedoc-Roussillon / GROTTE DE LIMOUSIS The largest developed cave in Aude. It is made up of eight chambers and a series of five stalagmite barriers and a large number of concretions. The last chamber houses an exceptional mass of aragonite crystals, known as the Chandelier, 4 metres in height and 10 metres round.

A friend gave me a writing prompt the other day (a simple, "he opened the door and saw..."), and through it I stumbled into another world beneath our own. It was beautiful but boldly different from any place I have gone before. That's a new thing for me -- my books have mostly traveled the realm of places you might see every day -- or you would see if you traveled back in time. This, however...while believable...was fearless in its uniqueness.
And it was a delight for me to roam around and explore.

Buy Journey to the Center of the Earth at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/435776 and then visit www.johnpirillo.com for free stories, artwork and blog.

How about you? Have you ever written a place that was both outlandish and beautiful?

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Goodbye and God Be With You

It's rather fitting that some things come to a close on this day -- the last day of the year. I submitted my last entry into the Rooglewood contest this morning. I can hardly believe it took me until the day of the deadline to send it in because I'm usually earlier than that. And, even with the extra time I took, I still felt a little bit like maybe I could have done better if I had more time. But there was no feeling of regret when I hit "send." Mostly it was just a prayer that Rooglewood would hear the heart of the message when they read it and that maybe, if I win, they could help me bring the full potential out of my little story. And there was also a feeling, after working on these stories for more than six months, that it felt good to close that chapter and move on to the next one. I did it. I wrote them. And I'm really proud of them. Last year, the act of hitting "send" on my contest entry catapulted me into an anticipatory state....

The Countdown: Eight Days

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Wherein I Still Have My Nose and Ears

I decided to take the plunge. I was going to chop a plot thread out of AAM so the story would fit in the contest word length restrictions. I saved my old version and set up a copy for me to modify. Stories are like woven cloth. Each plot thread is woven into the entire story. So if I decide to cut a character or a side-theme, I have to go through the whole book, chopping out the references to it. This leaves gaping holes and sometimes it looks like the whole story is going to unravel. Everywhere I chop, I have to readjust the whole scene to keep the flow. It's a rather ticklish procedure. Over the dinner table, I mentioned that I was chopping a sub-plot. My younger sister protested loudly (she hasn't read it, but I previously told her the general idea). Then my mom (who also hasn't read it) offered to read it and tell me what she thought could and couldn't be chopped. ...

The Pen of a Ready Writer

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