Michael T. Miyoshi's Blog, page 4

My Second Sequel

I wrote a second sequel to a short story. And I think it works.

I am not much for sequels. Which does not mean that I do not watch movie sequels. I do. But rarely, does the sequel measure up to the original. Which is why I pretty much do not write sequels. Unless they just come to me.

That is what happened to Amongst the Beach Detritus and Again Amongst the Beach Detritus. I just had to write the sequels. They jumped right out of my mind and onto the page. Literally. Okay. Not lite...

Books and Blogs

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Just because you have books out there, does not mean that anybody will buy them. Or maybe that is just me.

I have more than two dozen books out there on Amazon. And I would venture to guess that I have sold about that many books. Total. It is not discouraging or anything like that. It is just interesting. Well, I suppose not that interesting even. After all, I do not do that much promoting or anything like that. I can barely even tell people I have known forever that I have books out...

Time Flies

Time flies. Whether or not you are having any fun.

It is not really an aha moment or anything like that, but time really does fly. When you are having fun. I know. The saying is supposed to give you a little perspective that when you are having fun, it seems that time is going so much faster than normal. Like you are in a time warp or something. One moment you are starting to do your fun thing. The next moment, it is time to be done. Bed time or suppertime or quitting time or something....

Do or Do Not

Do or do not. There is no…

We have all heard Yoda’s quote from The Empire Strikes Back. “Do or do not. There is no try.” It is a great motivational quote. I tell athletes this all the time. Actually, I tell them that “can’t” is a naughty word and it will cost them 25 pushups. But the notion that we are either going to do something or not do something is certainly a truism. We might try. And we get away with trying. But that does not cut it in reality. We either do or we do not. Ther...

Typoglycemia

Can you raed tihs? Of course you can.

It is interesting that we make up words to describe phenomena that we observe. Typoglycemia is a term that somebody made up to describe the phenomenon that at least some (dare I say most) people can read words even when you scramble the letters. Especially if the first and last letters are in the correct places. (By the way, apparently when you make up a term for a phenomenon, it is called a neologism. Who knew?)

Now, I had heard of the phenomenon be...

Contempt for Spelling Words

Have you ever spelled a word correctly, but saw it so many times that you thought it looked misspelled? Nah. Me neither.

I recently wrote about the app and website, DailyPrompt. I sent a preview to the founder of the endeavor and he told me about a mistake that I had made. I had misspelled DailyPrompt in one place. I thanked him and told him I would fix it. Which I did. The interesting thing though is that I used DailyPrompt 17 times in the post. Which is a lot for any single word in on...

Again Amongst the Beach Detritus

[Note: This is a sequel to Amongst the Beach Detritus.]

The flashing blue lights and red lights are driving me crazy. But I cannot move from the beach detritus. It is safe here. And I can hear what is happening. I can hear the man in the uniform and Joey.

“My wife, Sophie, was sleeping in the sun, so I decided to clean up. I was doing my part and separating out the trash from the food garbage from the recycle. I just finished when Sophie screamed. I ran to where she was lying. Her ring fing...

Amongst the Beach Detritus

Beach detritus. You always hope you’ll find Aladdin’s lamp or the corner of a buried treasure chest when you comb the beach. But there is always just beach detritus. And people’s garbage. People can be so disgusting. That’s when I saw it. Lying there amongst the mostly empty food containers and wrappers. A gold ring with a diamond.

The diamond ring glinted in the sunlight. A special ray of sunshine had hit it just right so that I was the only one who could see it. I walked, nay ran, to it. Af...

DailyPrompt

Photo courtesy of Ryan Lindsey

I may not really need it, but I got a new writing tool. DailyPrompt.

Even though writers write, sometimes we need something to write about. Sometimes we need prompts. So I joined DailyPrompt to get prompts daily.

Now, I do not really need writing prompts every day. Or very often really. I mainly decided to join because a friend of mine, who ought to be a writing tool salesman, told me I should. Tim keeps telling me about all these different writing tools, an...

Editing Is Never Done

Editing a book is never done. Ever.

One nice thing about print-on-demand books is that when you find errors in your books, you can just correct them and update the book. Nobody will be the wiser. It is slick. Of course, that does mean that you need to read your own books. Something that I do not always want to do.

I already wrote about reading the book Wired For Story. And one of the lessons that I came away with is that writing is rewriting. Which means that you are never done. Which...