#micro memoir

[poetbutterkristenmitchell]

Anyone here writing a micro memoir? I am trying, but I don't want to do it in such way as to hurt anyone I have known in my life. I think as writers we have a great responsibility not to do so and if there is any hurt words inflicted it should be upon ourselves. Thoughts?

[lelandlocke]

A Magical Affliction... Getting Ms. Gretta

Never, ever did I think I would be one of these people. For years, in my mind, it seemed desperate; it seemed so, so needy. And yet, despite my anguish, denial, and reluctance, I can’t deny it. Not only am I not denying it, but I will admit it to you, Dear Readers. When Tara drove all the way from North Carolina to the shit-hole rehab apartment complex I was living at in West-Side Cleveland to…

[mercurial-thrills]

Just An Average Tuesday - a micro-memoir

I realize how I'm routine oriented to a particular, specific point. 

I wake up between 6 and 7. It used to be 6 on the dot - now it's somewhere around 6:20 on average. I eat my breakfast of Cheerios - used to be a green smoothie from Food Basics before I went on medication. As soon as my abdomen throbs, I know that after I poop, I brush my teeth. Then, I put on my day clothes - it used to be "pants first" everyday, all the time - now I end up only in my underwear before throwing my bra on top, and dealing with everything else. 

I go to the bus at the same time, all the time, and feel immense stress when it doesn't come when I expect. On Tuesdays like these, I leave at 6:50 and watch it come by 7- and then I'm at school by 7:45, preparing to start my day. 

Everything gets planned in my calendar. Day in and day out, I modify it based on my plans. On any other day, it would start with walking the dogs - always the small one first, otherwise he'll sob and wake up the entire neighbourhood. Then, I'd meditate for 8 to 10 minutes. After that, I'll get started on schoolwork, treating the Pomodoro method like gospel, taking 30-minute breaks at 10, 11:30, and 2. 

I'm the type of neurodivergent person who thrives on this: the type where routine to me is like fish to water. It's my bread and butter, the apple of my eye, and most of all, a way to navigate an anxious life. 

***

If you found this piece insightful, or felt inspired by it, I would highly suggest you write about your own routine, how you react to change, how you add variety to your day, and more. If you post it here on Tumblr, feel free to tag me 😊

[rozmorris]

Questioning our notions of home – memoirist and writing coach Jennifer Lang

Where is home? What does home mean? For memoirist, essayist and writing coach Jennifer Lang, that question takes a while to unravel. In her early 20s she married a man from a very different background and lifestyle, and their life path has been full of choices and dilemmas. These are the subject of her collection, Places We Left Behind. I’ll let her explain. It’s a love story with a lot of…

[unusuallysized-nsfw]

Wanted to try something weird for a vingette (thats what i call short fiction like flash in the pan one offs) so heres a monologue written from the perspective of an unknown entity in another unknown entity's gut post Nomming.

This version of it will be safe, that means no digestion or panicky themes. this entity expected to be here.

Inside Them; A Post V0re Memoir

I'm not certain what all I expected when I landed in here. I guess i anticipated it being darker? but apparently skin and organ tissue...isn't that thick...its still dark but not pitch black...

I did hope to hear a heartbeat, but it seems the only real ambience ill get is the sloshing of...well the acid and muffled sounds from outside.

oh!

and an occasional gurgle...

The walls are...tougher than i imagined, bit rubbery but somehow slicker aswell; touching them causes a reaction hehe.

There isnt any air in here...as to be expected. any that was woulda got burped out, but i came prepared. Always be prepped when spelunking!

I can feel them moving. when they do my whole room moves...well their stomach rather.

I read once that it would actually take HOURS to be digested since stomach acid isnt that powerful on living tissue. but luckily i wont be here long enough for that to happen...even if i wasnt protected.

I feel...very calm in here. away from the world.

there is a comfort in being in them, hidden from all but them, its a feeling that makes me happy. we are about as close as we can ever be!

Perhaps... This is what safety feels like.

I think i'll take a nap, they'll prolly wake me with a drink haha...

[doublebarrelslopgun]

The Classic Hysteric

Limbs ever-warping, orchids growing out of her sleeves, the classic hysteric walks the frigid urban wilderness alone. Her eyes snap like firecrackers, taking in the options and possibilities of every heartbeat around her. Every pulse has an opportunity, a choice to be next to her if she curls her tongue in the right directions at the right times. It’s an exhausting game, but it’s what comes naturally when you’re too firm on your feet to be a dancer yet too loose in your words to be a singer.

She didn’t choose this life, but make no mistake: it was handed to her on a silver platter. Beezlebub knocked on her door one day when she was still a child, starved by everyone who even noticed she was still standing with knees locked inward, and commanded her to eat the only thing she had left: herself. So she relished in the taste, it was better than any meal she’d had in her life, one that wasn’t quite poor enough to be pitied by most. She refuses to admit it, but every twist in her stomach that bends in the direction of whoever’s closest is a futile chase of that long-gone high.

Her indecisive nature lives in the consciousness of everyone that’s ever known her, like an ever persisting lump in their throats, choking them to death on their own distaste. She lingers like a ghost of opportunity at every gathering, permanently adorned in a mourning dress for the funeral of a little girl who died right next to a playground while everyone else felt the first flicker of light behind their eyes. She is forever in love with the idea that one day, someone will return her heart in the mail with novelty stamps and a note saying, “It’s okay, none of this was real. Nothing you felt was real. You can rest now. None of it was ever your fault, and you can go to bed and do this all for real this time. Love from mom and dad.” Yet, she knows deep down the closest she’ll get to such prose is the ephemeral justifications from the people that come and go like waves on the beach.

She keeps that thought in the hole in her chest, next to the red aluminum flag that will always be down.

The classic hysteric strides across the town square, wilting petals falling with every step, a reminder that no one is coming to save her for longer than the moment contained in the choke before a sob. One day the wretched plant will finally tighten enough around her spine to put an end to this wretched cycle of desire without a cause to desire, and she can fall to nothing as she finally tells the damn truth.

[pretentious-librarian]

It’s hard to remember a moment so soaked in adrenaline but I’ll try anyway. I remember teeth clashing against teeth, sand grinding between my toes when our lips connect. My hands have no destination, only a brief exploration of the warm body before me. My lungs burned for air as his hands sloppily caress the curve of my hips. Giggles and squeals fill my ears as that translucent bottle spins round and round endlessly. Has it a thousand years or a single second? Then all of the sudden, the rich smell of his colonge is replaced with simple smell of the sea, his soft lips no longer intertwine with mine, leaving me with a feeling of profound emptiness. I lick my lips clean of him, my tongue swiping away the taste of his beer and cigarettes as the pale moonlight illuminates his silhouette against the darkness of the sea behind him. His dark curls sway in the ocean breeze his sharp jaw clenches into a drunken smile in response to my wide eyes fill with every feeling a person can experience. I can feel the heat of my cheeks that he has made flushed, and my heart pounds rapidly, yet inside it is a dry, desolate desert, devoid of feeling. I become aware that my bikini straps are too tight. That my bare thighs are chaffing. I don’t know what to do with my hands as my fingers intertwine with themselves. And suddenly I am no longer 17, standing on the moonlit beach with the tall stranger. Now I am again a little girl reading fairytales, imagining the passion, love, and excitement of a first kiss. But that little girl is disappointed; tonight there were no fireworks within. When our lips connected, he tasted of beer and cigarettes but overpowering them all was the taste of empty lust.

[slay-classy]

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[writingquestionsanswered]

Hi. I'm the person who asked for help with the enemy of the week type thing. I was wondering if you could explain the different types of writting? (fanfic, novella, all that stuff)

Different Types of Writing and Stories

By Word Count: *

Drabble: 100 word story Micro Fiction: 50 to 500 words Flash Fiction: 2000 words or fewer Short Story: 1000 to 10,000 words Novelette: 7,500 to 20,000 words Novella: 20,000 to 50,000 words Novel: 50,000 to 120,000 words Epic Novel: 120,000 words or more * (estimates vary)

By Type:

Poetry: literature using figurative language and crafted verse Fan-Fiction: fiction written by fans of existing canon material *** Diary/Journal: personal account of life experiences Travelogue: personal account of one's travel experiences Fiction: prose literature describing imaginary events and people Non-Fiction: prose literature about factual events/subjects/people Creative Non-Fiction: creative writing used in non-fiction narrative Play: a script for a story to be performed on stage Screenplay: TV/movie script including acting and scene directions Technical Writing: professionally written technical information Critical Writing: personal reviews of a product like film/food/book Expository Writing: provides facts and research about a given topic

By Fiction Genre: Fantasy Sci-Fi Adventure Thriller Romance Historical Fiction Contemporary Children's Fiction Dystopian Mystery Horror Paranormal

*** fan-fiction can be any word count/genre

By Non-Fiction Genre: Memoir Humor Travel Self-Help History How-To Motivational Humor Personal Development Cookbook Art Family & Relationships

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

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[vonspe]

Poisoner's Claw reminded me of Minthara in BG3 admitting to micro-dosing her love interest with poison to build up their tolerance. Would Scipio want to do the same? Or would the idea of Emmrich ingesting ANYTHING like that be too much for him and thus a deter even if paranoia tells him it's to protect him? (Also rip to Emmrich's clothes, the skull boxers almost sent me into an asthma attack from laughing.)

Ok , so. I'm not at all sure about if it was in Ozzy Osbournes memoir or some other 70s/80s musician(might have been Andy McCoy, might have been someone from Mötley, I honestly don't remember bc I read it like 10 years ago. I'm sure the book has many things that are just simply fictional as well.), but i remember a part where he was given a bunch of anesthetic drugs for some medical procedure and he just did not fucking go under because he'd been doing so much of every drug imaginable for like two decades and had an insane tolerance. That's my HC for Emmrich lmaooo. Not many things can kill Emmrich but definitely not common poisons. He has a poison tolerance to rival Scipio's own and he got it by having a good ol' time.

Scipio's actually not terribly worried about Emmrich getting hurt in general, Emmrich is more capable of keeping himself safe than Scipio is lol. Scipio does give him a dagger before Fade prison(and leaves his sword behind in the Fade at the feet of Hardings statue, so he loses all of his weapons. Stupidest high INT guy in existence.)

[corsairesix]

The title of Why Necromancy Doesn't Exist comes from the memoir Why Fish Don't Exist, which includes lots of taxonomy and cladistics. I was a bookseller at the same time this book was popular, so the name stuck with me

The title of the book is based on the argument that, cladistically, "fish" is not an actual category. A salmon is more closely related to a camel than a hagfish. Why Necrromancy Doesn't Exist was based on a worldbuilding exercise I did that argued something similar about magic

In the exercise I wrote about how necromancy isn't actually an inherent school of magic, it's a trade. A dozen different schools of magic, just applied to dead bodies. It was fun to write, so I made a game out of it

I've always been interested in taxonomy (not just of animals, but as a subject), especially when it's heated and personally or politically motivated. I love odd results like the Catholic church classifying capybaras as fish. If you also enjoy this stuff, check out this game

[justforbooks]

Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates

In contrast to the current crop of swaggering tech bros, the Microsoft founder comes across as wry and self-deprecating in this memoir of starting out

Bill Gates is the John McEnroe of the tech world: once a snotty brat whom everyone loved to hate, now grown up into a beloved elder statesman. Former rivals, most notably Apple’s Steve Jobs, have since departed this dimension, while the Gates Foundation, focusing on unsexy but important technologies such as malaria nets, was doing “effective altruism” long before that became a fashionable term among philosophically minded tech bros. Time, then, to look back. In the first of what the author threatens will be a trilogy of memoirs, Gates recounts the first two decades of his life, from his birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft and its agreement to supply a version of the Basic programming language to Apple Computer in 1977.

He grows up in a pleasant suburb of Seattle with a lawyer father and a schoolteacher mother. His intellectual development is keyed to an origin scene in which he is fascinated by his grandmother’s skill at card games around the family dining table. The eight-year-old Gates realises that gin rummy and sevens are systems of dynamic data that the player can learn to manipulate.

As he tells it, Gates was a rather disruptive schoolchild, always playing the smart alec and not wanting to try too hard, until he first learned to use a computer terminal under the guidance of an influential maths teacher named Bill Dougall. (I wanted to learn more about this man than Gates supplies in a still extraordinary thumbnail sketch: “He had been a World War II Navy pilot and worked as an aeronautical engineer at Boeing. Somewhere along the way he earned a degree in French Literature from the Sorbonne in Paris on top of graduate degrees in engineering and education.”) Ah, the computer terminal. It is 1968, so the school terminal communicates with a mainframe elsewhere. Soon enough, the 13-year-old Gates has taught it to play noughts and crosses. He is hooked. He befriends another pupil, Paul Allen – who will later introduce him to alcohol and LSD – and together they pore over programming manuals deep into the night. Gates plans a vast simulation war game, but he and his friends get their first taste of writing actually useful software when they are asked to automate class scheduling after their school merges with another. Success with this leads the children, now calling themselves the Lakeside Programming Group, to write a payroll program for local businesses, and later to create software for traffic engineers.

There follows a smooth transition to Harvard, where in the ferment of anti-war campus protests our hero is more interested in the arrival, one day in 1969, of a PDP-10 computer. Gates takes classes in maths but also chemistry and the Greek classics. Realising he doesn’t have it in him to become a pure mathematician, he goes all-in on computers once a new home machine, the Altair, is announced. He and Paul Allen will write its Basic, having decided to call themselves “Micro-Soft”.

The early home computer scene, Gates notes, was a countercultural, hippy thing: cheap computers “represented a triumph of the masses against the monolithic corporations and establishment forces that controlled access to computing”, and so software was widely “shared”, or copied among people for free. It was Gates himself who, notoriously, pushed back against this culture when he found out most users of his Basic weren’t paying for it. By “stealing software”, he wrote in an open letter in 1976, “you prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?” This rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way and still does, at least in the more militant parts of the “open-source” world. But he had a point. And that, readers, is why your Office 365 account just renewed for another year. Fans of Word and Excel, though, will have to wait for subsequent volumes of Gates’s recollections, as will those who want more about his later battles with Apple, though Steve Jobs does get an amusing walk-on part. (Micro-Soft’s general manager keeps a notebook of sales calls, on one page of which we read: “11.15 Steve Jobs calls. Was very rude.”). This volume, still, is more than just a geek’s inventory of early achievements. There is a genuine gratitude for influential mentors, and a wry mood of self-deprecation throughout. Gates gleefully records his first preschool report: “He seemed determined to impress us with his complete lack of concern for any phase of school life.” Later, he explains how he acquired a sudden interest in theatre classes. “Admittedly the main draw for me was the higher percentage of girls in drama. And since the main activity in the class was to read lines to each other, the odds were very good that I’d actually talk to one.” Strikingly, unlike most “self-made” billionaires, Gates emphasises the “unearned privilege” of his upbringing and the peculiar circumstances – “mostly out of my control” – that enabled his career. Adorably, he even admits to still having panic dreams about his university exams. The book’s most touching pages recount how one of his closest friends and colleagues in the programming group, Kent Evans, died in a mountaineering accident when he was 17. “Throughout my life, I have tended to deal with loss by avoiding it,” Gates writes. He says later that if he were growing up today, he would probably be identified as “on the autism spectrum”, and now regrets some of his early behaviour, though “I wouldn’t change the brain I was given for anything”. There is a sense of the writer, older and wiser, trying to redeem the past through understanding it better, a thing that no one has yet seen Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg attempt in public. That alone makes Bill Gates a more human tech titan than most of his rivals, past and present.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[bottlecap-press]

From Gina Twardosz's chapbook, See Appendix B, available from Bottlecap Press!

[harryandmeghansussex]

PRINCE HARRY, THE DUKE OF SUSSEX Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex is a humanitarian, military veteran, mental wellness advocate, and environmentalist. He has dedicated his life to advancing causes that he is passionate about and that bring about permanent change for people and places.

He spent the first 10 years of his adulthood serving in the British Army, during which he undertook two tours of duty in Afghanistan as a forward air controller and an Apache helicopter pilot. After completing his military service, The Duke founded the Invictus Games Foundation, a platform for wounded, injured and sick service personnel to use sport as rehabilitation. The international event is a globally celebrated display of resilience, community and athleticism that is universally recognized for its impact in celebrating those that serve.

Prince Harry is also the founder and patron of a number of global charities and organizations including Travalyst, Sentebale, African Parks, and WellChild. In 2021, he was named Chief Impact Officer at BetterUp, a world-class coaching platform that helps people everywhere achieve their own peak mental fitness. That same year, he served on the Aspen Institute Commission on Information Disorder, which brought together critical voices across the public, private, and civil society landscape to respond to today’s mis- and disinformation crisis.

Most recently, he co-founded The Archewell Foundation, alongside his wife, Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex, to serve communities in need at a micro and macro level. The couple also created Archewell Productions to produce programming that informs, elevates and inspires through a creative partnership with Netflix. He is a New York Times Bestselling author with his literary debut, Spare, a memoir of his life through the lens of compassion, vulnerability, and unflinching honesty. Spare is notably the fastest selling non-fiction book in history, selling over 1.4 million copies on its first day of publication.

Prince Harry resides in California with his wife Meghan, and their two children Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet.

[economicsresearch]

page 562 panel a - Of course you are welcome to tell yourself that the machine connects you to more of your life, in the same way having access to wikipedia makes you smarter. It doesn't. You are an empty vessel that sometimes feels filled but moments later you are drained and vacant. You don't remember anything. You just look and move on. You have farmed out the hard work of memory to a tool and you are now slave to it, your abilities of recall atrophied. Plenty obliterates all nuance and subtlety. Unless your goal is to be a shit cyborg whose experience of the world is a shallow one, you are not better for your tools.

The cost of it all only adds to the humiliation. Not just the cost of having emotional profundity erased and overridden by visual overabundance, but there is actual treasure we hand over to be treated in this way. A worse product at a higher price. Remembering for ourselves is free but now there's rent. Maybe only cents on the day but still we tithe a corporation to keep a dead parent alive or remember an ex who we hated at the end. Why are they still here? Monetary cost, emotional cost, such small amounts you barely notice, but real all the same. The ghosts of memory we can't quite see, the ghosts of wealth drained that we never knew we had, they all grow fat and laugh at us.

Memories gained, memories lost. It feels natural, like the moon and the tides, ceaseless and without worry. As the night draws on this moonrise is lost but there will be another tomorrow, it goes. But once we decided to hoard and fortify, make memories permanent now that they're safely stored outside our fallible biology, it all becomes brittle and a loss is catastrophic; there is trauma in preservation now. Our technological aide-memoire (usurper-memoire?) make us think it can all be retained, we just need to use the tools, pay the toll, be conscientious, have some goddamned personal responsibility. But a harddrive melts, a password is lost or a company goes bankrupt and once again there is the same old loss. Only this time it's your fault. If only there had been a third back-up or a fourth, then I wouldn't have so foolishly deleted this piece of my soul. And we are left ill and worried by a buzz inside us as we try to keep it all safe, but we can't. We can't control the corporation that dances and sways in capitalism's breeze or even the micro solder that has some imperfect weakness at an atomic level, We can only pray.

[haveyoureadthispoll]

PSYCHIATRIST: So how can I help you? ME: I don't know, I'm – what's the word – depressed? Do I have to go into detail? Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her - what to call it? - depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgmental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends, performing the calmness her lifestyle demands. The effort is exhausting, overwhelming, and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can't be normal. But if she's so hopeless, why can she always summon a yen for her favorite street food: the hot, spicy rice cake, tteokbokki? Is this just what life is like? Recording her dialogues with her psychiatrist over a twelve-week period, and expanding on each session with her own reflective micro-essays, Baek begins to disentangle the feedback loops, knee-jerk reactions, and harmful behaviors that keep her locked in a cycle of self-abuse. Part memoir, part self-help book, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is a book to keep close and to reach for in times of darkness. It will appeal to anyone who has ever felt alone or unjustified in their everyday despair.