• Random

    Fictionally Insane!

    It’s official. I’ve been committed to the Brinkvale Psychiatric Hospital. More accurately, one of my personas has been committed to this fictional institution, the setting for J.C. Hutchins’, Personal Effects: Dark Arts novel. The online elements of the story allow readers to become protagonists. I’m a certified “dead-ender.” Cool! You can get committed to the Brink too. It’ll be fun. How often do you get the chance to be fictionally insane? The dark artwork that convinced the staff I’d gone over the edge is on display in the patient gallery. Can you guess which is mine?

  • Blogging,  Creativity,  writer's block,  writing

    Creative Jailbreak

    “Before embarking on his life as an artist, Vincent Van Gogh wrote of his yearning to be creative, which caused him to feel like “the man…whose heart is…imprisoned in something. Because he hasn’t got what he needs to be creative…Such a man often doesn’t know himself what he might do, but he feels instinctively: yet I am good for something, yet I am aware of some reason for existing!…something is alive in me: what can it be!” Quoted in Brewster Ghiselin, ed. The Creative Process, 1952. Van Gogh’s words resonate with me. So often I sit at the keyboard with only an awareness of something there, something imprisoned that needs to…

  • Blogging,  Personal,  writer's block,  writing

    Blocks and Blues

    You can see a punch coming from a long way off. You think you’re tough enough to take it. You brace yourself. It knocks you flat. I knew my Dad was dying before he went into hospice care. I was fighting to get the family to stop torturing him with medical procedures and let him die with some dignity. A couple of weeks ago I got my wish and they stopped all support. Those last few days of him clinging to life were hell. I wanted his suffering over and now it is. So now that he’s at peace, I should think I would have some peace. I don’t. I…