Kelly A. Harmon's Blog, page 9

Writing Prompt – The Most Meaningful Moment of Your Day

We experience tens of thousands of seconds–small moments–each day. Even our worst, or our most boring, day surely contains a meaningful moment or span of moments.

Omitting the most special and the most horrible of days, I am hard-pressed to define a single most meaningful moment in my day.

(Is that my ingrained sense of adventure surfacing? I can always find something interesting, even at the most mundane of times…)

I like when the alarm goes off at 5 a.m. in the morning and I peek out the wind...

Writing Prompt: “Reading Stories is Bad Enough but Writing Them is Worse.”

I’m reading Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables currently as part of my Project 100–and I’m quite enjoying it. Anne is an imaginative, talkative , young girl of ten who is forever getting into scrapes brought on by her flights of fancy. As the book begins, she’s adopted by a quite sensible spinster woman whom Anne refers to as Aunt Marilla.

Aunt Marilla is a dried up, middle-aged woman who lacks imagination and sucks the life out of people with her discreet and circumspect habits. Sens...

Writing Prompt: Exercise and Creativity

I just got a new treadmill, ostensibly to shed a few pounds gained during my two foot surgeries in the last year. I prefer running outdoors, but with winter coming, the treadmill is the best bet to get back on track during the darker winter months here.

A few of my writer friends have turned their treadmills into writing desks, citing all the health benefits of obliterating a sedentary lifestyle. Not wanting to be left out, I’m giving it a try.

The Husband of Awesome™ and I made a trip to one o...

Writing Prompt – Blending In

Today’s writing prompt is brought to you by the wonderful cephalopod: the octopus. The video below shows how quickly (less than a second in some instances) an octopus can blend into its surroundings.

Most people try to do the same thing, as first evidenced in grade school: wear what everyone else is wearing, get the most popular haircut, carry the same backpack.

What happens if you don’t? Nothing, if you’re lucky. But if you’re the kid (or the adult, even) who stands out, you often face a boatl...

Writing Prompt: Change of Habit

Old habits die hard.

It’s a bit of cop out here to rely on tired aphorisms, but it gets my point across succinctly.

A change of habit–getting out of one’s rut–can take a monumental effort of strength and will. Creating new habits can take the same. (New Year’s resolutions, anyone?)

But from a fiction writing standpoint, they offer so much fresh material–so much potential for a character to grow and experience–that it might be worthwhile to add it to your Writer’s Toolbox. (You may prefer, to do...

They Took a Lickin’ and Kept on Stickin’

I mailed a box home to myself when I was away last summer, rather than bring it home on the plane. (Yeah, I’m finally unpacked to the bottom of it. No judging!)

I stopped at a rural post office to do the deed. The post office had no electronic scale, and no machine to print out postage.

Everything was done by stamp.

The ladies in the post office were ECSTATIC that I was mailing such a heavy box home because they got to use up all the old stamps they had lying about the place. (They were a tiny b...

New Story Available: Lies

I wrote a story a while back called Lies. It shortlisted for the Aeon Award, but I never did anything with it.

Now, Lies has been published and is currently available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

The wheels of distribution grind very slowly in some parts, but it should soon be available via Kobo, XinXii, iTunes and elsewhere very soon. I’ll let you know when that happens.

In the meantime, here are the links to:

Lies, Amazon, $2.99

Lies, Barnes & Noble, $2.99

Writing Prompt: Preparedness

September is National Preparedness Month. Since I work for a government agency, we’re getting repeated reminders to:

Stay Informed

Make a Plan

Build a Kit

Get Involved

…all with the usual hype and rhetoric.

(I’m all for being prepared, btw, I just don’t think it should be a crazed, one-month endeavor. Shouldn’t you be prepared all of the time?)

I don’t know if it’s related to Preparedness month, but the local constabulary hijacked our public parking lot Monday morning to hold some kind of drill or t...

Requiem

Never forget.

I Have Figs!!

I have been babying a few fig trees for the last few years, wrapping them up in blankets and straw each winter and letting them breath in the spring.

One has taken off really well, the other two only so-so. The second two are a different variety, so it could be that they’re much more slow growing. I really need to do so some research on them…

In all these years, I haven’t had a fig. But now I do! Check out this guy:

At first, I thought it was going to be the only fig, but then I noticed this lit...