Stream of Consciousness
One Story Below Is True
Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter — What If? Writing Exercise for Fiction Writers prompts The Exercise — In two or three sentences, write down three unusual, startling, or amusing things you did or that happened to you. One thing must be true; the other two must be lies. Use details.Read them to a group, and they may ask questions to help them guess which one is and which ones are not.The Objective - To understand how we can exaggerate events in our lives, appropriate the lives of others - friends, enemies, strangers - or just plain out and out lie. All these are ways of using what we see and experience to produce fiction.
By Denise E Lindquist8 months ago in Writers
Tarot Cards Meaning: Understanding What Each Card Really Tells You. AI-Generated.
You know that feeling when you choose a tarot card and discover its meaning for the first time? It’s weird. Your hand just sort of… knows which card to pick. I’ve watched people do this hundreds of times and it still gives me chills. There’s something about the way someone’s fingers hover over the cards, hesitate, then land on one specific card that feels anything but random. Tarot gets a bad rap as some kind of carnival fortune-telling gimmick, which honestly bugs me because it’s so much more useful than that. Think of it more like a visual therapy session or a conversation with the wiser part of yourself that you usually ignore because you’re too busy scrolling Instagram. That’s also why so many people prefer to choose a tarot card and discover its meaning intuitively instead of memorizing rigid definitions. The deck has 78 cards, and each one is basically holding up a mirror to something happening in your life right now. Some of these cards have been around since the 1400s which is a long time for something to survive if it didn’t work on some level. When you start learning what the cards actually mean beyond the spooky stereotypes, you’re picking up a whole language. Not one you speak out loud, but one your mind understands through images and symbols. It doesn’t matter if you bought your first deck last week or if you’ve been shuffling cards for years getting a real handle on tarot cards meaning makes everything feel clearer. Life’s confusing enough without trying to figure it out blindfolded.
By Clara Starlight8 months ago in Writers
Notes from a Quoting Mind: On Language, Power, and Repetition
Homo Citans: The Quoting Man Against Originality Homo citans names the human as a quoting animal, a being who speaks by repeating, citing, echoing, and rearranging the words of others. Every sentence enters the world already inhabited: by traditions, concepts, metaphors, and rhythms that precede the speaker. To cite is therefore not an exception of scholarly life but its default condition. Researchers, writers, and thinkers are links in a chain, not origins; they validate knowledge by showing where it comes from, how it travelled, and whom it passed through. Citation is thus not merely a technical practice but an ethical acknowledgement of interdependence, a recognition that thought emerges collectively rather than individually.
By Peter Ayolov8 months ago in Writers
The Structural Integrity of Breath. AI-Generated.
"The clock has struck three, the coffee is cold, and the shadows are beginning to speak. Welcome back to the desk of The Night Writer, where the stories are brewed in the dark." I was born in a Techno-Thriller, but I am currently trapped in a Surrealist Body-Horror. In a Techno-Thriller, everything is data. The world is a grid of logical progressions, high-stakes countdowns, and sleek, cold surfaces. My life is supposed to be about encrypted servers, the hum of a cooling fan, and the precise, mechanical clicks of a keyboard at 4 AM. I should be the protagonist who cracks the code under pressure while a digital clock ticks down in red neon. The problem is the Anxiety. Anxiety doesn't recognize the grid. Anxiety is a surrealist painter with a grudge against straight lines. The Breach I was sitting in my workstation at the Aethelgard Tower. The goal was simple: Bypass the Level 4 firewall, retrieve the encrypted ledger, and get out before the security sweep at 0300. My heart rate was supposed to be a steady 75/bpm, controlled by a tactical breathing loop. I had the biometric feedback monitor clipped to my earlobe. The screen showed a clean, green wave. Then, the first glitch happened. Not in the code. In me. The green wave on the monitor didn't just spike; it turned into a vine. A thick, thorny bramble that began to grow out of the side of the screen. This is a hallucination, the Techno-Thriller side of my brain whispered. Check the CO2 levels. Check the ventilation. But the Body-Horror side—the side fueled by the adrenaline of a panic attack—didn’t care about ventilation. It watched as the vine wrapped around my wrist, the thorns sinking into my skin not with pain, but with a familiar, itchy heat. The Melting Keyboard "Elias, status report," a voice crackled in my earpiece. It was Sarah, my handler. She lived entirely in the Thriller. She talked in verbs and deadlines. "You have four minutes before the patrol hits the sub-sector. Have you cracked the root?" I looked down at the keyboard. The keys were no longer plastic. They were teeth. White, ivory molars that felt soft and wet under my fingertips. When I tried to type sudo access, the keys groaned. The 'S' bit my pinky. "The... the hardware is non-responsive," I gasped. "Check the cables, Elias! Focus on the protocol!" I tried to focus. I closed my eyes and reached for the 'Tactical Breathing' protocol: Inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four. In a Thriller, this works. The hero regains his composure and hits the final keystroke. In the Horror of a panic attack, I inhaled, but the air wasn't oxygen. It was liquid lead. It pooled in my lungs, heavy and gray. When I tried to exhale, my mouth wouldn't open. It had been replaced by a zipper. I could feel the cold metal teeth of it fused to my lips. The Countdown The digital clock on the wall was at 02:58:12. The red numbers began to bleed. The '8' dripped down the wall, forming a puddle of liquid time on the floor. The carpet began to breathe in sync with my frantic chest. The room was shrinking, the walls moving in with the slow, rhythmic beat of a giant, invisible heart. "They're in the hallway, Elias! Move!" Sarah’s voice was a needle in my ear. I looked at the monitor. The firewall wasn't a wall of code anymore. It was a giant, unblinking eye. The pupil was the ledger I needed to steal. To get it, I had to reach into the screen. The Techno-Thriller demands a physical tool—a USB drive, a bypass chip. The Anxiety demands a sacrifice. I reached out. My hand didn't hit glass; it sank into the cool, gelatinous surface of the eye. The sensation was sickeningly intimate. The room around me dissolved. The Aethelgard Tower fell away, replaced by an infinite hallway of mirrors where every reflection was a version of me that had failed. The Cohesion I grabbed the data. It felt like a cold, wet stone. The security guards burst into the room. In their world, they saw a man slumped over a desk, hyperventilating, his hand pressed against a blackened monitor. In my world, they weren't guards. They were towering shadows made of my father's disappointments and the missed deadlines of my twenties. They didn't have guns; they had magnifying glasses, ready to examine every flaw in my character. "Target acquired," I whispered, though the zipper on my mouth made it sound like a hiss. I pulled my hand back. The eye in the monitor closed. The teeth on the keyboard turned back into plastic. The thorns on my wrist retreated, leaving behind nothing but the faint, red marks of my own fingernails where I’d been clawing at my skin. I stumbled toward the fire escape. The "Failed to Fetch" error I’d been seeing on my screen all night wasn't a server issue. It was my soul trying to reconnect with a body that was too terrified to inhabit it. The Aftermath I made it to the street just as the sun began to bruise the sky. I handed the USB drive to Sarah in the back of a rain-slicked sedan. She looked at me, her brow furrowed. "You look like you've seen a ghost, Elias. It was just a Level 4 bypass. Standard stuff." I looked at my reflection in the car window. My mouth was a mouth again. My lungs were full of air, not lead. But when I looked at the digital watch on my wrist, the numbers were still shaking, just a little bit, as if they were afraid of what happened when the clock hit zero. "It wasn't the guards," I said, leaning my head against the cold glass. "It was the structural integrity of the breath. It almost didn't hold." She didn't understand. She lived in a world of plots. I lived in a world of pulses. And the next mission was only twenty-four hours away. "The sun is threatening to rise, and my ink is running dry. Until the next moonrise, keep your lights on and your secrets close. This has been The Night Writer."
By The Night Writer 🌙 8 months ago in Writers
Uneasy
The flickering lights seemed to bounce my legs up and down. I was feeling uneasy in this room full of old magazines and a wall that seemed to have seen generations of people. There was no smell that was distinct but the queazy feeling went up to my nose and for some reason queasiness smells like the icy cold air in the morning. Everyone around me was on their phones but my mind was too busy to be looking at mine. I wore a formal outfit and I thought this kind of outfit would make me feel more confident but instead, it made me feel less than. I tried to enlarge myself in my head but it felt like trying to stretch out a rock - it was impossible. I tried deep breathing but I felt like for every anxiety I breathed out, the more anxiety I breathed in. Then someone walked in and called my name. It was now time for my job interview.
By Marianne Lee8 months ago in Writers
Lemonade
Lemonade tastes like sin. When you gulp it down, it goes down painfully. When you’re done drinking it, your tongue is focused on the acidic punch. Once you get over the citrusy taste, the lemony scent turns rancid on your breath until you cleanse yourself with some holy mouthwash.
By Marianne Lee8 months ago in Writers
Winter mornings
She felt the side of her face sinking deep into her pillow as she woke up from her slumber. It was one of those rare days where she felt well rested. She rubbed the brightness from the sun off her after she opened her eyes. The winter mornings are especially harder to wake up because that means she has to cold plunge her body into the cold air while stepping out from her warm blanket. She counted to three and quickly peeled the blanket off her. She couldn’t wait to jump into the hot shower and get ready for her day. It was going to be a good day.
By Marianne Lee8 months ago in Writers
The Reversed Timeline
Charlie was spiritual. He enjoyed the mystic, magical beliefs, devotee to Odin, he separated himself from most societal norm, to journey into the unknown. He was particularly interested in lucid dreaming; hypothesizing that each dream, was another life, in an active, differed timeline. This obviously broke many a thought within others, especially those normalized into and around societal norms; yet, he was optimistic in his theories, and was even more so, excited to attempt another travel.
By Elizabeth Lauren Jean8 months ago in Writers
Preservation for Eternal Impact
It is easy to feel as though most of what is said disappears. Words are spoken, written, posted, argued over, and then quickly buried beneath the next wave of noise. Attention moves on. Platforms refresh. What once felt urgent becomes invisible. In that environment, a quiet but persistent question emerges. What actually lasts. And more uncomfortably, what is worth preserving when so much seems to vanish without consequence.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast8 months ago in Writers
