Jeff Coleman's Blog: Jeff Coleman Writes, page 31
June 18, 2015
What do you do?
What do you do when you’re feeling down, when despair grabs you by the throat and throttles you to the ground? Do you fight back, or do you lay down and let life have its way with you?
When I was a kid, my dad told me once that sometimes, it can be hard simply to exist. I didn’t understand him then, but I do now.
Filed under: Personal
June 17, 2015
When Will I Learn?
My writing often follows a particular pattern. I start out eager and excited, charged up and ready to go. I have a ton of ideas, and I feel like nothing in the world can stop me. Then I sit down to write. At first, it’s great. I think that at long last, I’ve found peace and comfort in my craft, that at long last, I’ve conquered self-doubt and am no longer overly concerned about getting it one hundred percent correct the first time around.
Then a few weeks into the cycle, self-doubt returns,...
June 1, 2015
Read First Chapter of “The Others” for Free!
The Others is an enchanting middle grade fantasy that will instill a sense of otherworldly wonder in children and adults alike.
Download and read the first chapter for FREE by clicking here.
Jason is your average eleven-year-old boy. He likes TV. He has a babysitter he could do without. His little sister Janie is his nemesis. He also happens to have a passion for magic.
Not real magic, of course. Jason has devoted himself to the study of illusion and sleight-of-hand since the age of five, whe...
May 15, 2015
Friday Freewrite
What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.
In an ocean of voices, how does one communicate his own? The sound is lost before it ever leaves his lips, consumed by a torrential outpouring of a million different words all trying to say a million different things.
In an environment such as this, where everyone gets to have their say, how can one make himself be heard?
Sometimes, the effort just to continue speaking seems too great to bear; like a heavy boulder strapped to my back, I cannot endure...
May 8, 2015
Friday Freewrite
What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.
The mind is a rough unrefined oar1, full of gold, but in a useless form.
Freewriting is like dynamite. It blows the rigid unusable rock of the mind, blows it into tiny chunks and find sand that can be melted down, refined, worked into polished gold and silver and crystal.
Sometimes, to solve a difficult problem, to break through a writer’s block, to give expression to an inexpressible thought, all you need is a good old fashioned2 explosion and the pa...
May 1, 2015
Friday Freewrite
What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.
How am I like a flame?
Sputtering, I consume what lies before me, knowing not how long I have left before my fuel is exhausted, before my ephemeral existence is extinguished forever, swallowed by the dark.
I burn passionate and bright. I gaze toward Heaven, stretch high into the sky, longing to cut my ties to this wick, this earthly tether that holds me fast to the ground in a jar.1 I burn bright, my eyes lifted toward the heavens, toward flames in th...
April 27, 2015
Letter to a Bully
Once, you killed me in the worst possible way.
But like a Phoenix, I’ve been reborn from the ashes. The wings you clipped when
we were young have regenerated. They’ve unfurled like a newborn flower, and I’ve
taken to the sky once more.
You can’t hurt me now. I’m out of reach.
If you want to keep up with my work and to know when I publish my next book, join my mailing list by clicking here. In return, I’ll send you a free copy of my short story The Sign. I’ll only send you an email once a m...
March 13, 2015
Friday Freewrite
What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.
My writing muscles, rusty and ridden with arthritis in their old age1, squeak and squeel2 and catch as I try to capture that once fluid rhythm that I had once known when I’d regularly fed and nourished my writing, before the neglect, before the indifference, the laziness, the unwillingness to go on in the face of difficulty. I open the faucet, expecting an outpouring, and I find that the pipes have run dry.
Frantic, I run to the well, hoping to find u...
March 6, 2015
Friday Freewrite
What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.
He imagined what the meeting would be like1, and he cried. He hadn’t met her yet, and already he cried. Enough premature emotional ejaculation and he was fairly certain there would be no tears left to shed for the event itself.
He tirelessly rallied against the imperfections of others2 because he secretly harbored a grudge against the imperfections in himself.
He gazed out the tiny double-paned plastic porthole3, taking in the landscape below, ripples and...
February 28, 2015
Who Am I? It’s A Mystery.
My nephew Mason had his fourth birthday party last December, and the house was saturated with plastic helium balloons. When the festivities were over, I tried to think of things I could do with them (other than make myself sound like a chipmunk) so they wouldn’t completely go to waste.
Suddenly inspired, I grabbed a sheet of paper, scribbled a note and attached it to one of the balloons before releasing it into the sky. It was my hope that I could instill a sense of mystery and wonder into a r...
