Dear readers, you may have noticed that there is now an option to subscribe to the Scribbling Buddha. Here’s the deal: Subscriptions are entirely optional. This weekly email will remain free, always. Your monthly contribution of $7 (that’s just 1.75 a week) helps support the work that goes into creating the newsletter AND gets you access to two weekly guided meditations that will be posted for subscribers only. I hope you will consider signing up.
And now, this week’s eight great things:
Tomorrow (Saturday) is National Donut Day (yes, it did just happen in June, there are two of these every year). I would argue that we really only need one, and that it should be the November 5th date that gets preserved (seeing as Halloween has passed and we are officially into the sugar, I mean, holiday season), but apparently the one in June was created to celebrate the women who brought treats to the soldiers during WWI. I’m hardly going to suggest we forget about them, so I guess we move ahead with two national donut days. Such is our burden to bear.
Nerd Word of the Week (courtesy of my Twitter friend @DVKeet): horripilation ~ a bristling of the hair on the skin from cold, fear, etc.
I’ve been thinking this past week about the idea of mastery and how, as a writer, I don’t think it’s something I will ever achieved. The challenges of writing change with every story. It’s one of the reasons I love the work. Read more on the blog.
Hernan Diaz’s new book, Trust, just won the Kirkus prize for fiction. I LOVED his last book, In The Distance, and didn’t realize he had another one out. Oprah Daily called it “fun as hell to read,” and y’all know how I feel about Oprah.
Have you heard? Meditation techniques are “gaining momentum and popularity among writers.” If you’re curious, check out this 10-minute guided meditation for writers (or this 15-minute meditation on joy), and then subscribe to this newsletter to get access to all future recordings.
You may have heard some of the rumblings about how Penguin Random House has been trying to buy one of its main rivals, Simon & Schuster. The consolidation of two of America’s biggest publishers would have been a big deal, but on Monday the courts decided that it was too big a threat to competition in the marketplace. For now, at least, the Big 5 remain intact.
Writing by Writers is hosting a straight up wacky writing contest. Submissions (in any genre) can be up to 250 words and must include ALL of the following: a food known for its consumption during a particular holiday, the name of a deciduous tree, a lyric from a song from the seventies, the name of a breed of horse, a geologic event and the name of a constellation. Deadline is December 1. Submit your entires here. And good luck!
Learned a new term this week: Hopepunk. It’s science fiction that leaves us with a sense of hope. The term was coined in opposition to what is known as “grimdark” (stories that do the opposite and pretty much leave the reader feeling that all is lost). Curious? Check out Book Riot’s recent piece What Are Hopepunk Books, and Where Should I Get Started?
Happy writing, my friends,
April