Authors Electric

I recently started writing short stories for the Reedsy Prompts weekly contest . This is a fantastic competition for kickstarting your writing if/when you feel blocked. The prompts are always thought-provoking with great scope for exploration. The best part is that you get to read the other stories submitted to the contest once the winners are announced. Exploring hundreds of different ways to interpret the same prompt is a wonderful testament to human creativity, as well as reassurance that AI is not going to steal all of our jobs just yet.  In all my years of entering writing competitions, I’ve never won a single thing. I don’t take it to heart. It’s a writer-eat-writer world out there (I’m kidding—I love learning from other writers. I’m also a vegetarian and not a cannibal). But in all seriousness, I enter these contests not with a hope of victory, but with the knowledge that it’s a great way to improve my craft.  Well, dear reader, guess what? The very first story I entere...

Jobim, 1981 Águas de Março, Tom Jobim's poetic, meditative, 1971 Bossa Nova gem celebrating southern Brazil's rainy month of March, has been playing in my head as we free-fall into 2021. Back in the 1980s, I memorized the lyrics so I could strum to it with my Goya, Spanish guitar. The song - about endings, beginnings and timeless flow, Zen and the beauty of common things - helped me through a rough patch. I can neither recite nor strum it from memory now, as this new year begins in which we all hope to emerge from a rough patch. But it's there, still flowing. "A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road It's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone It's a sliver of glass, it is life, it's the sun It is night, it is death, it's a trap, it's a gun The oak when it blooms, a fox in the brush A knot in the wood, the song of a thrush... ... It's the wind blowing free, it's the end of the slope"  - The Waters of March , Antonio Carlos ...