Do you have change

Just when we are confident we have it all worked out. Experience, observation and wisdom have all lined up, the necessary pieces not fit together and lo and behold, along comes a wrench when we really needed a flathead...

And so we go back to the box, drawing plane, surface situation and jam pack it with things for things or  whatchamacallits for thingamajigs that jimmy rigged together. For now, all went make to a humming working order; fixed and figured up from out of order to smooth sailing, for now we feel like Master Craftsmen and ultimately it feels good to be needed, a take it not a lever, our ingenuity to be necessary for some end, the right job for the right tool and all that.

Now, just what in the world are we talking about? Just about everything. Life is a series of working-on-it-fixing-it-thing-a-ma-jigs or some such sequence of events-some repetitive, others seemingly (k)new.

The anarchist in the village is change and the little devil is ruining the peace, his presence spells CHANGE, I know it is scary. It is offensive. It is personal, it is a dirty harsh word. 

Change is change-worthy, that is the one thing that never changes with change, it never changes to one thing without changing again. Change, for better or worse, finds us. Change changes us.  It changes situations, it can appear good or bad, it can be quick or calculating but never lingers too long in any one location.

The day it all breaks down, when change decides to stay too long, the day we notice it changing the way we live while we are busy living someway building up resistances, walls, and barriers, we will realize our bricks were made with straw and are starting to break down under current circumstances, that is the changing, the current of energy, the flux swung wider.

At the outset, we knew we need the AC and DC to work with electricity properly, and it is shocking-the resistance to change at our fingertips-at failure to understand proper conductivity and the power to change.

Climate changes. Yes, it does. We have seen this and every generation calls it new, a revelation in cycles. We make our homes so cozy and relatively free of quantum jitters, from inside we are protected from erratic tsunamis of gravity and this keeps most of us calm, accepting and willing to try change if only to move to higher ground.

Our cars, our planes, our holograms and computers are coming in stronger but we still do not see the necessity for change, who asks a baby not to grow? Every mother, of course-but that is love and something (holy) inexplicable. Wait until our computer fall short…Next we think we can direct the comets were to free fall-not too close-now-stay safe-stay alert. There may be patterns bigger than you or I can see, or correlate and restate as experience and knowing. It’s not personal, this change wasn’t about you. Look up! That is no rainbow, it’s a silver lining-come stand over here.

See, it wish I wrote faster-it already changed again.   



Image courtesy of By NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute [Public domain], Peering into storm (Earth) via Wikimedia Commons.

Get on the Write Mentor-ship

There is no competition in Writing.

Writers are generous. Writers possess empathy. Writers are professional communicators.

There is no competition among writers.  

The most successful people are held up by their mentors, not their inspiration or muse or any invisible character, a mentor is a real human who has already had success in their profession because they had a mentor to hold them up, and they also felt indebted to their own mentor(s).

Did you want examples? Look at the best-seller list, then look seven degrees to the write.

Writers are not competitive towards other writers, other writers writer other things.

Writers are the products of all the words they have read, starting with the alphabet multiplied by experience equals a life sentence in language. This is a blessing, a challenge to the writer, to make the sentence fit the crime.

Writers make sense of things that make the most sense to them, to some this is nonsense, to the writer it is common sense.

Writers are not competitive because their closest literati linguist competitors are all dead, or classically outdated, meaning they are not publishing new work.

Writers are hermits that desperately want stroking. Writers are sensitive to light and laughter. Writers have a special touch, often able to thaw cryogenic hearts, able bend stained steel wills and lift the eyes of millions of humans in one small package of prose.

Writers are proud of other writers writing other things that meet great success. Writers are most proud of their other successes.

Successful writers are to be heard and not seen. Successful writers do not overshadow their work, the work is allowed to step out of the shadows leaving the writer in the dark and considers themselves an on-call chauffeur. The work will guide the way through the labyrinth, the writer invents the wheel to keep things rolling and pays for fuel.

All writers are successful if they are writing what they want and it is good. All good writers are not as successful as they want.

Writers are not competitive with other writers, they are writing their own stories, win or lose, breaking rules and keeping their “I”’s on the ISBN.

Writers writing are not competitive careerists, they are too busy writing their way past the competition.

All writers are winners at the end of the human race. They make up the ends, they make up the beginnings, they make up what they do with their time, they make up time most of the time. All Writers are chasing time and have no time for silly competition.

All writers are somewhat silly ( anice word-don't you think?), at least they think they are. This is why they talk to themselves and call it work.  Silliness. Writers even write about writing.

Writers take their work very seriously and writers learn to leave their work lightly.

Some writers are righting wrongs, often the wrong writers are writing the right things, but the righters are writing it all wrong, and writers know the difference between write from rite. Although everything writers write may not be always right. Writers do not fight (with other writers), it gets too touche. 

Writers write and do not compete with other writers struggling to write their own way.

Writers are running their own race at their own pace. Each writer to his or her own creative case not trying to reach the finish line, but save face and conserve stamina while simultaneously surpassing others.

Writers are inspired by other writers dazzling capabilities of combined speed and efficiency. Output is income. Is this competition?

Writers only compete for dazzling. Come-in, I put-out, this cover says. There are shelves for that. Romance and Fantasy both pulped from the same tree. See, there is no write way to say you may not be the right one for all but you can confidently know that you are always write for one. 

There is no competition like there is in writing.

(Our Literary Journal would like to 'thank you for your submission'. We appreciate the opportunity to discuss our writing further without competition for your time and although we did not have the time to read your submission personally, we are certain it is not as good as the ones we did read, namely, the ones we were familiar with. Please keep in mind that this Journal is not for profit, subsequently, we make no profit off of other peoples' poetry or prose like all the other Literary Journals. 

FYI: This years' competition was tough! There were a whopping total of 11 electronic submissions which were then filtered by our diligent Copy-editor, to make certain it reads like everyone else-copied and bland, or non-offensive and that we liked which left 3 to choose from, not including your own! Please continue to submit to next year's contest, we really need the submission fees to keep reading others work and giving them your money. Thanks for your on-going support in the Arts of Rejection.)


Painting by Carl Spitzweg (1808-1885) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.