There is a certain kind of person that feeds on your pity. They never stop. — “If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world. It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.” — Oscar Wilde Everyone you’ve ever…

It’s not as complicated as you think it is. — Imagine that your mother was a witch. And her mother was a witch. And her mother that came before her. Since you were an infant you’d been raised in the witch’s bog, in the black quartz huts that hung underneath kudzu, camouflaged by moss. Your mother tucked magic herbs into…

What ghosts, Ouija boards, and demons teach us about what it means to be human. — I’ve often craved for the unreal to be real. I used to go to Barnes & Noble every week, back when e-books couldn’t be immediately downloaded to your devices. While I was there I got a couple paperbacks, and then usually ended up grabbing a copy of either The Fortean…

We don’t need to escape into fantasy to make our lives feel exciting. “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” ― Rachel Carson “The more clearly we can focus our attention…

The trolls of the Internet serve an important function in our society “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” — Friedrich Nietzsche The word edgelord was first added to Urban Dictionary in 2015. An edgelord is “someone on an internet…

“Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.” ― André Malraux I have the answers if only people would listen to me You probably don’t have all the answers. You probably don’t even understand the problem you’re trying to solve half as well as you think you do. Whether these ‘answers’ be political/religious/ideological, they only seem…

Determine what category of writer you are, and which category you want to be in. — Wherever you are in your writing career, self-reflection and the ability to change course is always a useful vehicle for improvement. I ran across some notes I’d written to myself a few years, lifted and repurposed from an ACT therapist’s manual about the different categorizations of therapists. …

If you’re talking about free will, you may be having the wrong conversation. Human ego and drunk poets have ruined the powerful concept of soul and turned it into a flowery notion. Your character (body-mind) can function on its own. Soul doesn’t do anything. It just witnesses what the character…