Next time you write in your journal, switch the pen to your other hand and write.


I know. I know. You can’t write with your other hand. Never mind. Try it anyway.


Writing with our non-dominant hand can have interesting results because it confuses our brain. Part of that protest you just put up about not wanting to write with the wrong hand was your brain’s way of keeping things predictable. That’s okay. That’s its job. Let’s face it: we function because our practical brains are in charge. Our brains do a phenomenal job of keeping the world understandable and keeping our bodies and behaviours in sync with that world. But the parts of our brain that are so effective at everyday life, may not be the parts that give us the best results when it comes to pure creativity.

Since creativity may be useless, nonsensical, playful, wordless, metaphorical, musical, messy, and so on, the practical brain that serves us so well, needs a little nudge to get out of the way while we create. Try writing with your ‘wrong’ hand to make this happen.

Why does this work? Our non-dominant hand is linked to the non-dominant hemisphere of our brain. Some studies indicate that one hemisphere is active when using the dominant hand, but both hemispheres are activated when the non-dominant hand is used. Either way, many people find that they ‘think differently’ or that surprising things get written down when using the non-dominant hand.

I should caution you that therapists having used this technique have found that some people access primitive and raw emotions, so I am not suggesting here that this be used as therapy. If you are interested in that, please be sure that you’re working with a trained professional first. (I used to have a link to this finding, but it’s gone away. Do a search if you’re interested in finding out more.)

The use of this technique here is suggested as a warm-up to further creative activity. It’s suggested as a way to circumvent the linear part of our brain and get into the wordless, metaphorical, visual part.

There are other ways that one can use this technique. If you have an everyday situation that needs problem-solving, try writing about it with your non-dominant hand. See if, by doing so, you can come up with a more ‘creative’ solution than you’ve considered previously.

Another possibility is to use it when you want to remember or learn something new. I have a friend who wants to improve her vocabulary. While she’s having her coffee each morning, she copies words from the dictionary using her ‘wrong’ hand. She swears that her memory for the words is more reliable now. She even reports beating her husband in SCRABBLE for the first time after doing this for a few weeks. Now that’s worth something! Remember…both sides of the brain being are being activated. She just might have something here.

Try it. Politely and gently—using bad handwriting—ask your everyday brain to step aside for awhile while creativity and new ways of thinking are explored.

See why R-mindfulness changed to C-mindfulness at The Practically Creative Quarter. Click on C-mindfulness at The PCQ to read about other ways of accessing your C-mind.

This post is a re-print from The Practically Creative Quarter, the creativity site that I started in 2005. There are lots of articles, most with pictures. Go see!

Everyone loves a sneak preview, right?

Third Person Press is happy to announce that Volume III of The Speculative Elements Series is in the final stage of production. Our largest anthology to date, this collection is brimming with 21 awesome stories.

Our contributors are:

Mona Anderson, Walter Carey, Ken Chisholm, Wesley J. Colford, Kerry Anne Fudge, Larry Gibbons, Meg Horne, Joyce MacDonald, Lorena Mann, Bruce V. Miller, Katrina Nicholson, Sherry D. Ramsey, Wade Rideout, Alicia Serroul, Jule A. Serroul, Peter Andrew Smith, Stephanie Snow, James F.W. Thompson, Jenn Tubrett, Donald Tyson and Nancy S.M. Waldman.

A grand total of nine of these authors are being published by Third Person Press for the first time, proving that we continue to UNEARTH the best in Cape Breton speculative writing!


More soon about the release date and launch party!

The Quillians is an online writing group that meets in Second Life. We are fortunate to have as one of our members, John Lambert, who in addition to writing, has a lot of experience with podcasting. With his experience and hard work—along with co-moderator, Sherry Ramsey—The Quillian Chronicles podcasts came into being last year.


Last month, my reading of NetWorld was published. (NetWorld was published in print and as an e-book, in 2008, in Undercurrents, Volume 1 of the Speculative Elements Series.) The podcast reading was then followed by another podcast of an interview that John and I did. We talk about my writing background, issues that came up in the writing of NetWorld and other discussions of interest to working writers.

Both podcasts are available, as are all of the shows, on The Quillian website, through iTunes, or at our sponsor’s site: audible.com.

You can also find out when new podcasts are available by “liking” our Facebook page: The Quillian Chronicles

And, stay tuned, because in the fall, The Quillians begins a new adventure in writing: Popcorn Tales.

Announcing the publication of Third Person Press‘ latest release: To Unimagined Shores, Collected Stories of Sherry D. Ramsey.


Sixteen stories were previously chosen for publication in an impressive array of international magazines, collections and anthologies including On Spec, Simulacrum, Fantasy Magazine, The Day the Men Went to Town (Breton Books), Michael Stackpole’s The Chain Story Project, Gateway S-F, Neo-opsis and others. The seventeenth is a bonus story, never before published.


The collection is divided into three parts. Part One, Science Fictional Shores, includes seven stories about such intriguing topics as a road trip with a hitch-hiking alien, stolen embryos on a colonized planet, and inter-planetary intrigue involving a hip Spaceport detective. The second section, Fantastic Shores, contains six fantasy-based stories on such deliciously intriguing subjects as a Victorian time machine, climate change in Hell, and a daughter’s redemption with the help of an unconventional angel. The last section, Magical Shores, boasts four stories which revolve around one main character: a young female apprentice to a crotchety but wise old wizard. The stories are by turns funny, tragic, light-hearted, serious but are always adventurous and unusual. Mark Rayner, author of “The Amadeus Net” and “Marvellous Harry,” writes: “Sherry D. Ramsey’s short stories are filled with vibrant characters, good writing, and thrum with humanity, even when there aren’t many actual humans in the story.”

Ramsey, a former lawyer, is a full-time writer whose novel, One’s Aspect to the Sun, won second place in the 28th Annual Atlantic Writing Competition’s novel category, the H.R. (Bill) Percy Prize. She works for The Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia Writers-in-the-Schools program, helping to teach youth about creative writing. She serves on the boards of The Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia, S-F Canada, and the Northside Development Association. She has been editor-in-chief and publisher of the award-winning online writer’s resource, The Scriptorium for a over dozen years and is one of three founders of Third Person Press, local publishers of speculative fiction.

Both print and e-book versions are on sale at: thirdpersonpress.com

Breton Books has a new collection of short stories from Cape Breton, called The Men’s Breakfast. I am delighted to have my story, Her Top Forty, included. I’m in great company with stories from Julie Curwin, Russell Colman, Phonse Jessome, D.C. Troicuk, Victor Sakalaukus, Paul MacDougall, Teresa O’Brien, Frank McDonald, Bill Conall, Dave Doucette, Tim Vassallo, Stewart Donovan, Brian Tucker, Larry Gibbons, Joyce Rankin, Mary Steele, and Maureen Hull. The book can be purchased online from capebretonbooks.com

I, in the guise of Aplomb Pomilio in Second Life, will be reading my original short story “NetWorld” this Saturday evening (February 19th at 6pm SLT). This story originally appeared in Undercurrents, published by Third Person Press.


This is the fifth of The Quillians Fantasy and Science Fiction Workshop monthly readings and other special events, occurring on the third Saturday of each month at 6pmSLT (9pmET/6pmPT).


If you miss it, you’ll have a chance to catch the recording once our new podcast gets rolling, but you’re urged to attend now as the podcast won’t be starting up just yet.


The reading will take place in the Workshop building, on the second floor beside the traditional meeting circle. The reading is a voice event, so attendees are encouraged to come with their “ears on” and their microphones off. Since the event is also being recorded, we request that you refrain from using audio ‘gestures’ or other devices that create ambient noise.

Sherry Ramsey, fearless, interim, co-leader of our online, Second Life writing group affectionately known as The Quillians, issued a writing challenge last week. We were to write an “anti-Valentine” poem.


Here’s my tongue-in-cheek, bumpity-thumpity response:

heart words: an anti-valentine poem
february 14, 2011


thump
beat beat-beat-beat
heart beat-beat-beat
up beat-beat-beat
thump lump skippity-beat
beat thump red hot
sweet date
pump fate
lub-dub respirate
pump bump thumpity-hump
breast beat chest bump
in-flate
vibrate
pump-pump circulate
up beat pumpity-pump
ping pang pittery-pat
in-spire chest fire
thump-thump-thump desire
bump breast ache beat
stiff beat hump bump
soul white heat mate
pulsate
palpate
bump-bump procreate
pump pump pumpity-hump
mate thump thumpity-hump
beat beat-beat-beat
beat beat-beat-beat
off beat-beat-beat
red vein fake feign
spit spat pittery-pat
blood bleat vain cheat
stalemate
ingrate
bleed thump violate
lub dub thumpity-pump
trump beat off dump
beat down break up
ache beat bleed deep
thump dump slump chump
pump dump bumpity-lump
pang ache jumpity-jump
ping pain pulse rate
prostrate
deadweight
thump-bump defibrillate
beat beat skippity-beat
beat beat-beat-beat
soft beat-beat-beat
pump red heart hate
sensate
oxygenate
hate hate hate hate
thump bump thumpity-pump
beat bleed beat beat
heart beat-beat-beat
thump

Thanks Luta for a fun exercise!
Other entries from the group:
Gary Henderson

It is Airborne night next Tuesday, February 15 at Governor’s Book Pub: Authors with Glasses starting at 7pm.


Come hear Sherry D. Ramsey and Julie A. Serroul read from their stories published in Third Person Press’s Airborne.



There’s also an open mike and, just so that the three-legged entity that is Third Person Press doesn’t become unstable, I’ve been promised a spot to read one of my post card stories. Come out and support Cape Breton’s speculative fiction authors!


Governors Pub & Eatery
233 Esplanade
Sydney
7 – 9

Check out my short story, “Worker Bee” in the new double issue of The Nashwaak Review (St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick).

From the website:

“The list of international award-winning contributors in this issue shows how far our magazine has come,” says Stewart Donovan, Professor of English Language and Literature and Irish Studies at St. Thomas University and editor of the Review. “Its reputation now attracts some of the finest writers in the country and beyond.”

Award Winning Poets and Short Story Writers

Award-winning poets and short story writers from across Canada are featured in the issue including Bert Almon whose most recent collection of poems A Ghost in Waterloo Station, won the City of Edmonton’s Book Prize and the Writer’s Guild of Alberta’s Award for Poetry.

Roger Nash, winner of numerous literary prizes including the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry, has two poems in the publication. Fern Carr, who has had her work published and distributed in over twenty countries and composes and translates poetry in five languages, has three poems in the issue.

Acclaimed poet and fiction writer Cyril Dabydeen is also a contributor. Dabydeen’s novel Drums of My Flesh was long listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and won the Guyana Prize for Fiction.

The issue publishes writers living and working in remote and exotic places: Julian Hoffman is living in northern Greece; Elena Johnson was the inaugural writer-in-residence at a remote research station in the Yukon; Joshua Learn recently spent a year freelancing in Latin America.

Emerging Writers

The issue also features many emerging writers. Deborah Herman from Toronto is a graduate student at York University. St. Thomas University’s Troy Fullerton, who was published in The STU Reader, has one poem in the book. And Matthew Cook, a student at Cape Breton University, earned the 2009 David Alexander Prize for the best essay written by an undergraduate in history at a Canadian university for his essay “Going Down the Road: Rural Cape Breton Migration to the Sydney Steel Plant 1899-1920”.

The artwork on the cover is by Lynda Lou MacIntyre, a recently retired school teacher from Cape Breton and artist of four previous Review covers.

The Cost of a Tasmanian Tiger


The Chain Story is pleased to release its twenty-third story, The Cost of a Tasmanian Tiger by Paul Genesse. Click on the story title to read to the tale.


Paul Genesse is the author of several short stories featured in anthologies such as Steampunk’d, Fellowship Fantastic, The Dimension Next Door, Furry Fantastic, Imaginary Friends, Catopolis, Terribly Twisted Tales, Pirates of the Blue Kingdoms, and more. He is also the editor and the co-author of the origin story for The Crimson Pact anthology series. His first novel, The Golden Cord, Book One of the Iron Dragon Series has become the bestselling book his publisher, Five Star Books has ever had. Book two, The Dragon Hunters is out and more novels are on the way. Paul writes when he’s not working the night shift as a registered nurse on a cardiac unit in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he does his best to keep the forces of darkness away from his patients.


In his spare time he has worked as a writing instructor/motivational speaker, computer game consultant, copyeditor, and proofreader. Listen to podcasts, read free samples or watch videos about the Iron Dragon Series and his other works at www.paulgenesse.com.