About This Blog

I have to give the majority of my inspiration for this blog to my brother, an amazing artist and painter. Last year, he started his own blog, “100 Paintings by Adam.” He proceeded to complete 100 original works of art, selling a lot of them and learning so much in the process. The thought (finally) occurred to me that perhaps I could do the same thing for my writing. The blog’s title comes from Gertrude Stein’s famous quote (one that Ernest Hemingway caustically parodied in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls – yikes! If you don’t know it, Google it). There’s always been a part of me that loved the idea of the ex-pat life of the great 1920s authors. I believe these author’s personal lives leave much to be desired, but there’s plenty to be learned from their raw talent.

My goal in having this blog is to inspire those creative juices to start flowing—writing begets writing, and I know that the longer I do nothing, the more “out of shape” I’ll be when it comes to my creative side. I would love to promise you 100 pithy, deep or polished works of literature, but I’m purposefully not going to put concrete constraints on myself. Maybe I’m taking it a little too easy on myself, but we’ll just see how it goes. My loosely-held goal is, however, to produce at least 1 piece of tangible work to display each week, be it a poem, a short story, a reeeeally short story, etc.

I’ve got a couple serious writing ideas on which I’d like to focus this year, so I’m trying out the blog as a way to spur myself on towards the materialization of these ideas.  Yet again I stress—I’m making no promises!

One thing you can expect is “Wednesday’s Weekly Haiku.” I remember well when we tackled the Haiku in school. It’s such a fun and simple way to sit down and put your thoughts to paper. Seems like I vaguely remember a general rule that Haikus should cover the topic of nature, but I choose to spurn that rule. My weekly Haikus will be about anything and everything (and nothing!).

So thanks for reading and taking this journey with me!