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I stop myself from creativity
I stop myself from writing posts like these because in the act of writing them, I judge myself for whatever I might say. I second guess my words. I dismiss them. I think I should edit it, and then edit it a whole bunch of times more, and I think about how after I have edited a post many times and then published it, when I later read it I start to cringe. I no longer like what I have written. So I stop myself from doing it in the first place. Or I stop myself because everything seems to have already been expressed by writers that I consider to…
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Flash Fiction: Without
Without By J. Parrish Lewis © 2018 They didn’t come for our guns, we surrendered them. On March 15, 2021, the inexplicable desire to be rid of every gun in my home woke me from my sleep. It wasn’t long before I learned that the same desire welled up within every gun owner. None of us seemed to understand our own actions — myself included — as we gathered our guns and piled them into our cars, our backpacks, our oversized eco-friendly recyclable shopping bags. Glocks, Shields, Rugers, Sig Sauers, AR-15s, Remingtons, Magnums — you name it, we had it — and bullets, bullets, bullets, truckloads of bullets, all of…
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Writing distracts a writer from writing
I’ve been neck-deep in my writing projects lately, and I kept finding that writing other things distracts me from writing what I enjoy writing the most. Whew, what a mouthful of typewritten words. I have to admit that, although I frankly did enjoy writing it, I was happy to complete the short story Secret Signs. The truth is that although it was a story I wanted to tell and a story I genuinely cared about, right now I’m wanting to keep diving into the fictional world I created when I first wrote The Goblin Road. What I’ve realized recently is that any other kind of writing is going to be…
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Secret Signs: Part 4 (Conclusion)
By J. Parrish Lewis Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 For nearly a week, Alice’s intended consequence for her mother, a perpetual cold shoulder, crumbled slowly until she gave in to her reality. No words, no apologies or favors, would get Alice what she wanted. She knew this because she knew her mother, knew that her mother means what she says and says what she means. By the end of the week, conversations were still chilly, but Alice felt herself letting go, a dog who has relented on the bone its master reclaimed. She did not see Wren. Once, as quick as a blink,…
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Self-doubt banshees and paralyzed monkeys
I have lost track of the number of times I have opened up the computer to write and let myself be paralyzed by the blank screen, or opened up my sketchbook and let myself be paralyzed by the blank page. When I started this website, it was going to be whatever I wanted it to be, without worrying about what anyone thought of it. I had other websites in the past and I felt confined by what I had intended for those websites to be, and sometimes this was due to my choosing a specific domain name that seemed to lock me into one category. Munkymind.com was intended to be…
Writings & Doodles by J. Parrish Lewis
![[image description: photo of J. Parrish Lewis, cropped so that only top half of head is available. Light-skinned, dark hair that is thinning. Photo has been altered to be a monochromatic blue tint.]](https://www.munkymind.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/hair.jpg)
