Tag Archives: Daily Writing Prompt

Fast Forward

Daily Writing Prompt: What advice would you give to your teenage self?

Never forget that you are stupid. You will do so many things that your older self will wonder how you even survived into your 20’s.

Think before you do. So many mistakes, so many times.

Be careful who you trust.

Run away from toxic relationships.

You are not fat.

You are not ugly.

Every second you live, time speeds up.

Appreciate the simple pleasures, they count more than you will ever think.

It Got Real

Daily Writing Prompt: How does death change your perspective?

For me the real question is how has my perspective on death changed? As a child, I realized that living things died but I felt inoculated from my own death since I still had many decades in front of me.

As a young teen I experienced grief after the death of my cat. It took about three days for the pain to begin to subside. The death of no person in my life so far has inspired such grief.

The fear of nuclear war loomed large when I was young but it also remained abstract. In fact quite a few doomsday scenarios have passed by me. The Doomsday Clock has become just a soft, background tick. My guess is that the End is Near warning has been sounding for as long as humans existed.

About three years ago, I started to become hyper-aware of my own death. Literally my life flashes before my eyes as my mind rewinds images from my past. On an off chance, I may have a couple of decades in front of me. Now it’s less abstract.

I remain cheerful when I confront each new day. The same old daily routine of living is fine with me and I don’t desire much adventure. I’m happy to quietly contemplate life and in turn contemplate death.

My Future Reads

Daily Writing Prompt: What books do you want to read?

  • The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
  • The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk
  • Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog, Jerome K. Jerome
  • Ulysses, James Joyce
  • The Golden Apples, Eudora Welty
  • Her Infinite Variety, Louis Auchincloss
  • Naked Sleeper, Sigrid Nunez
  • The City of the Sun, Tommaso Campanella
  • The Hunt for Vulcan, Thomas Levenson
  • What is Life?, Erwin Schrodinger
  • Doubt: A History, Jennifer Michael Hecht
  • The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, Natalie Angier
  • The Wandering Earth, Liu Cixin
  • System Collapse, Martha Wells
  • The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov
  • Bleeding Heart Yard, Elly Griffiths
  • Blood From a Stone, Donna Leon
  • Singing in the Shrouds, Ngaio Marsh
  • In the Teeth of the Evidence, Dorothy Sayers
  • To Love and Be Wise, Josephine Tey
  • Tender is the Bite, Spencer Quinn