Mynx Writes

Welcome to the 12 Blogs of Christmas!  Last year, some of my favorite bloggers and I got together to bring you 12 blogs filled with holiday magic and cheer.  We enjoyed them so much that we decided to share them with again this y ear , so be sure to visit everyone, and enjoy the 12 Blogs of Christmas Redux! Cartoon Classics What is your favorite Christmas cartoon?  When I think of Christmas, I think of those magical evenings leading up to the holiday when my sister and I settled down to steaming mugs of hot cocoa and Christmas cookies while we watched favorites such as the ones you'll find mentioned here.   The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus Marie Patchen Stop-motion animation is one of my favorite formats for Christmas cartoons.  I must have been spoiled by all of the good classics: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Jack Frost, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and of course, The Year Without a Santa Claus.  Being the huge fan of...

Melanie Saxton I remember as a little girl how those brightly colored refrigerator magnets beckoned, tempting me to figure out the alphabet. Sure, I loved dolls and stuffed animals as well, but always seemed to set them up in a classroom to "teach" them how to read and write. I didn't fully understand then that I'd become a writer, although I penned little crayon books about whales and dolphins and sold them, instead of lemonade, at a stand at my curb. I suppose that was a prelude to what would be coming, and God bless the neighbors who spent 10¢ on my little masterpieces. How kind of them, and they'll never know how that affected my journey to this very day. And so I played with poetry, entering contests and going for scholarships. I simply loved writing and did it for free, putting together announcements, handling church newsletters . . . anything to write. People came to me for everything from term papers to eulogies. Honestly, it never occurred to me th...

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...