Deborah Elizabeth Whaley

In honor of the spookiest month, consider writing a horror story! Even if you're not normally a writer. It doesn't have to long or even necessarily good. But give it a try! Think about what scares or unnerves you. Explore that (in a safe way) and put it to the page. You might just surprise yourself!

Good writing comes from passion. Not passion to make a dollar or passion at being noticed, but passion about the subject matter. Passion about the work itself. That is where good storytelling comes from.

Great way to start the day! #onepeloton #peloton #meditation members.onepeloton.com/classes/medi...

If you buy this book, in a few days your Alexa will beep and say, "You have one new notification from Amazon.com. A no-good worthless book has arrived." #amwriting #writingcommunity #kidlit #inventingreality www.amazon.com/gp/product/194...

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Happy Wednesday!

Black and white photo of a vintage Underwood typewriter.

No Quill

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.” -Edgar Allan Poe

#Spooktober #weapon #31DaysOfHalloween #ClassicMono
#photography #vintage #EastCoastKin #DangerousDays

Remembering EDGAR ALLAN POE - who left us 176yrs ago today

Edgar Allan Poe died on this day in 1849.

Doom.
Plague.
Despair.
Madness.
Creeping existential horror.

He would have loved 2025.

Brandon Taylor on the Quandary of Black Art The author discusses his latest novel, “Minor Black Figures,” and the discourse around racial subjectivity.

“Painting and novels to my mind are basically wed. You can’t take them apart from each other.” Brandon Taylor discusses his new novel, “Minor Black Figures,” which follows a young painter in the years after the supposed racial reckoning of 2020.

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful. ~Edgar Allan Poe

Bernardine Evaristo on a writer’s freedom and the sensitivities of storytelling, in conversation with Ostap Slyvynsky at Lviv BookForum 2025 this weekend.

Iain Crichton Smith For Angus MacLeod Headmaster, and Editor of Gaelic Poems Today they laid him in the earth’s cold colour, a man from Lewis with his seventy-five years struck from his head. Teacher, scholar, he had worked a true task when all alive, building a school, elucidating texts. The Gaelic shone quite clearly in his bones. A casket filled with ashes had been mixed with filtered sunlight and the small stones. A useful life with pupils and with poems: sufficient honours (his humour asked no more) he takes his place in many minds and rooms. Without their knowing it, his patient care instructs far hands to turn a new lever, a voice to speak in a mild-mannered tone. The deeds we do reverberate forever. Inveterate justice weighs the flesh and bone. His best editions are some men and women who scrutinise each action like a word. The truest work is learning to be human definitive texts the poorest can afford.

Teacher, scholar,
he had worked a true task when all alive…

—Iain Crichton Smith, “For Angus MacLeod”
New Collected Poems, @carcanet.bsky.social 2011

Today is #WorldTeachersDay. In this poem Iain Crichton Smith, himself a teacher, celebrates the life of a former Headmaster of Oban High School
1/4

Universities teaching literature students how to cope with long novels Critics blame GCSE English for deterring teenagers from the subject, describing the literature syllabus as boring and repetitive

“At degree level, students are still reading whole novels and plays. However, there are lots of initiatives to help students read. Some universities do reading resilience courses.”
www.thetimes.com/uk/education...

Exclusive | OpenAI’s New Sora Video Generator to Require Copyright Holders to Opt Out Executives at the company notified talent agencies and studios over the last week.

OpenAI is risking pissing off a lot of Hollywood with the next update of Sora, which will allow you to generate videos with copyrighted content (Iron Man, Shrek, etc.) unless the owner specifically opts out.
Scoop with @keachhagey.bsky.social and Berber Jin
www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...

How Two Young Men Got Pulled Into Internet Darkness, and How They Got Out Teens and men in their 20s look for belonging in corrosive online spaces but often end up feeling more isolated. “The beliefs themselves instilled loneliness,” one says.

Sometimes teen boys go looking for extremist content online. Often, it finds them. Julie Jargon and I
spoke to young men who fell down dangerous Internet rabbit holes and came out the other side. www.wsj.com/tech/how-two...

L.A.’s Entertainment Economy Is Looking Like a Disaster Movie Work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and Los Angeles’s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread.

The most important human story in the entertainment industry right now is the severe downturn in film and TV production in LA and how it's affecting middle-class crew workers. I spoke to dozens of them for this story about the depressed Hollywood economy. www.wsj.com/business/med...

“A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”

—Samual Johnson

"As for my approach to writing comic fiction in general, the simple answer is that I try to make myself laugh."

@chayab77.bsky.social interviews Pulitzer Prize Finalist Ed Park on his Debut Short Story Collection, An Oral History of Atlantis (Random House).

➡️ buff.ly/FH5A2MY

First Texas schools banned my book. Now it's 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' The problem isn't just the new state law. It's how some school leaders are reacting to it.

"I became a writer because, as a Houston high school teacher, I wanted my students to find books with characters they could relate to" writes Ashley Hope Pérez in the @houstonchronicle.com, "people looking to create vibrant lives in difficult circumstances." www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outl...

Why writers need to carry business cards We’ve all experienced this before: You want to get hold of someone but don’t know how. You could look them up online and probably find their email and phone number, of course…if only you could…

#selfpublishing #indieauthor #writingcommunity #amwriting #writerscommunity inventingrealityediting.com/2...

ptl

#fridayfoster

Hong Kong When I didn't know how to live I became my grandmother: opening windows in the morning early enough to see the light sifting between the curtains, I swept the floor with a bamboo broomstick and made breakfast. And in my head came her raspy voice and her soft voice and her quiet voice; which rarely laughed but was always delighted with living and eighty years of reticent habits cultivated by her small hands. She had not always been loved, so she knew all about love. And on days which were longer and longer still, on returning home to an empty apartment in that spectacular city - her voice emanated like bells. You must be hungry, she said, looking over at what I was cooking. And I laid my head in the lap of her voice, nodding. I am, I am. Sue Zhao

When I didn't know how to live I became my grandmother:
..
And in my head came her raspy voice and her soft voice and her quiet voice; which rarely laughed but was always delighted with living and eighty years of reticent habits cultivated by her small hands.
- Sue Zhao
#Poetry #LiteratureSky 💙📚👀

Ta-Nehisi Coates - BOTD
📚 #LiteratureSky

Why Are Your Poems so Dark? BY LINDA PASTAN Isn't the moon dark too, most of the time? And doesn't the white page seem unfinished without the dark stain of alphabets? When God demanded light, he didn't banish darkness. Instead he invented ebony and crows and that small mole on your left cheekbone. Or did you mean to ask "Why are you sad so often?" Ask the moon. Ask what it has witnessed.

Why Are Your Poems so Dark?

Isn't the moon dark too, most of the time?

And doesn't the white page seem unfinished

without the dark stain of alphabets?

When God demanded light, he didn't banish darkness.

- Linda Pastan
#Poetry #LiteratureSky 💙📚👀

I just took the 10 min Courage Meditation with Kirra Michel Taken by spanduaballet on the Peloton App. Give it all with live & on-demand studio classes with world class instructors, right from home.

#onepeloton #peloton #meditation

🫶🏽🧘🏽‍♀️

members.onepeloton.com/share/workou...

Read This When Things Fall Apart by Kelly Hayes | Pilsen Community Books A bundle of letters to activists and organizers on the frontlines in catastrophic times from Let This Radicalize You co-author Kelly Hayes In social movements, some heartbreaks are all but inevitable.

Just a reminder that if you preorder Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis through my favorite bookstore, @pilsencommbooks.bsky.social, you will get an extra letter from me tucked into your book. I wrote that letter this week, and I think some of you might find it useful.

Disney+, Hulu Are Hiking Prices Again Next Month Disney is raising the prices of its Disney+ and Hulu plans in the U.S., including most bundles, as of next month.

variety.com/2025/digital...

3 times in 3 years