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Today's exercise comes from Writing Excuses 10.1: Seriously, Where Do You Get Your Ideas?.

The exercise is as follows:

Write down five different story ideas in 150 words or less. Generate these ideas from these five sources:

1. From an interview or conversation you’ve had
2. From research you’ve done (reading science news, military history, etc)
3. From observation (go for a walk!)
4. From a piece of media (watch a movie)
5. From a piece of music (with or without lyrics)

Writing after the fold.

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[Estimated reading time: < 1 minute]

Over the weekend a friend directed me to the Writing Excuses series of podcasts. This is a series where authors (and writing teachers, from what I've gathered so far) talk about the writing process and how to improve it or even get started. I've listened to a few random episodes so far and have been enjoying them.

The episode format is pretty simple: about 15 minutes of ad-hoc discussion, a book of the week recommendation (with a note about free trial membership of Audible.com, the sponsor), and a writing prompt or homework assignment. The podcasts are short enough that I've been listening to them on my commute to work. They're also quite good and have planted a bunch of seeds in my head about writing, plotting, etc.

But it's all pretty pointless if the podcasts don't actually lead to writing. So, that's what I'm thinking of doing with this blog, writing up the "homework" assignments as posts. Fingers crossed, here's hoping we'll see some more random writing pop up here in the near future. The exercises will be "below the fold", so to speak, so hopefully it won't clutter things too much.

But on that note, I'm still trying to decide what this blog is going to be about, so expect to see a bit of churn. Mostly with content, but also with the look. Dunno if I'm really sold on the current theme, but haven't had the time or the inclination to hack it into something better.