Mynx Writes

Alex Diakonis I am a writer. After all the years I have tried different things: soldier; linguist; cyclist; barista and more, it feels good to say that I have finally accepted what and who I really am. People can go their whole life not knowing who they are and then, like a bolt of lightning, it hits them. BAM! “That is what I should be doing.” I wish I was one of those stories, I think it would have been cool. Not me though. Ever ignoring my father’s advice, I never make things easy on myself. I’ll give you, dear reader, the beginning of this path and some practices which have worked for me. The year was 1987. My mother had to work and my aunt had a day off, so she was babysitting my younger sister and me. I never was one for Barbies, so I resorted to asking if I could play on the computer. My aunt hesitantly obliged and gave me one of maybe 3 programs available at the time on her Macintosh: word processing. I started out typing things like my name and things like that....

SARK isn't exactly a Muse, but she puts mine to shame. When I was a teenager, I found this poster by SARK in a Toronto mall and immediately fell in love.  I took it home, gave it a place of honor on my bedroom wall, and made it a point to read it from start to finish at least once a day. Some of the best advice I've ever received for fostering my personal creativity came from "How to be an Artist", and to this day, the words remain with me, even though the poster has long since disappeared. If I could, I would take every single bit of advice in this poster and turn it into one of the 12 Steps For Fostering Your Creativity this weekend. However, rest assured that you don't need to stop at the 12 steps listed here today.  Find your own copy of this poster, frame it up, and hang it in your writing space - and don't be afraid to open yourself up to being the creative creature that you are. Are we ready, then?  Grab a notebook and a pen or open up a fr...

Greetings and hello from the land of tomorrow! *looks off camera, clearly confused* What? You want me to say what now? You sure this isn’t the sci-fi and beer drinkers biannual Spock and Ale convention? Oh dear. *throws away prepared script* Hello there and welcome to my ramblings about my writing career. I have been tasked by our wonderful web mistress here to share with you my experiences with writing and pass along any tips I have to you, the reader. So, as soon as she puts down the whip, we can begin. My writing hobby started with an obsession with wrestling. You can come back now and stop laughing; it's the truth. When I was a young pup, I was enraptured by wrestling. It wasn’t’ so much that I thought it was real (all wrestling fans know it is fake), but the intriguing characters and what they did in and outside the ring. In the 80s and early 90s, it was all about the over-the-top characters and their lavish lives. This made me obsessed with characters and how they coul...

Writing and blogging is an addiction. Admit it - if you write or blog - you are addicted to it.  It's your drug of choice, and you'd probably give up breathing before you put away your pen and paper or your laptop and bid adieu to the Internet forever. This is also the only addiction (that I know of), that you should want to become better at. With that in mind, every Friday for the year of 2012 I'm bringing you the Mynx Writes Weekend Workshop.  Consider it your own personal 12 Step Program for the weekend. Starting next Friday, with each Weekend Workshop I will tackle a different subject related to your addiction, including: 12 steps to overcoming writer's block 12 steps to putting off procrastination  12 steps for brainstorming 12 steps for fostering your creativity 12 steps for creating believable characters 12 steps for building a better blog 12 steps for social networking for writers and bloggers 12 steps for world building Becoming a Grammar...

I have been a writer for almost twenty years. By writer, I mean someone who has penned numerous stories and novels, but never had anything published. In 2006 I got tired of hearing from agents that my novel, Nephiim Genesis of Evil was a great story, but they didn’t think there was a market for it. This was before the ebook rage, at a time when the term self-publishing had an even worse stigma than it does now. I had a friend who encouraged me to go on ahead and self-publish the novel. I was hesitant but decided to jump in. I’m glad I did. Here are a few things I learned from that experience. Self-Publishing Was Easier Than I Thought It Would Be In 2006, I had to hunt for a printer to publish Nephilim and I was worried that the end product would look like a self-published book. I was pleasantly surprised that the released book was just like anything you could pick up at Barnes & Noble. I was also expecting to have a harder time getting it into stores and places online...

I'm not one to make New Year's resolutions.  The only resolution I've ever successfully kept is not to make resolutions in the first place.  That way, I never disappoint myself.  But, if you want to do something with your writing and your blog, and you've got the attention span of a gnat on crack like I do, you will need to set some ground rules for yourself.  I've been brainstorming over the last several weeks to come up with a list of ideas that should keep my writing and my blogging going strong throughout the year.  This will be no mean feat since I've got a degree to finish, a job to find, and then will have to juggle both in the process of continuing to blog and write. With that in mind, here are my writing and blogging resolutions for 2012. 1.   Set a schedule, and stick to it.   This doesn't mean that you can't rearrange or adjust the schedule as necessary, but make a promise to yourself that you will set a schedule and keep it.  For...