New blog post: Tarot for writers

@herself Love this! Thanks!

@ablaze thank you! :)

@herself so excited to see this! I'm (working to become) a fiction writer, and also just bought a tarot deck, though I haven't dug into learning about it yet. this is just the type of thing I'm hoping to use it for, thank you! (I haven't read your whole post yet but fyi that Micro Monday link didn't work for me; I did find this via search)

@cgrayson thanks so much! And also for the heads up on that link. I’ll get on it :)

@herself Great post!

@herself whoops, that Micro Monday link was on your "about" page, but I see you figured out what I meant. :-) really enjoyed that post and bookmarked it so I can give these idea a spin this summer when I dig into that my shiny new deck. thanks again!

@herself I've saved your article to my Instapaper account to read later. I've played about with Tarot in the past, have a deck here at home and am curious how you tie Tarot in with writing.

@herself so why ‘bold’ to call it an ‘article’?

Saved to read later.

@Cheri Thanks! :)

@cgrayson that's awesome. Yep, I figured that was what you meant! :)

@crossingthethreshold Thanks! It's not exactly ground-breaking, but I like that you can use it in different ways creatively.

@JohnPhilpin I was poking fun at myself :)

@JohnPhilpin fair enough! I don’t like that term either. Another bugbear is when reporters say “consumers” when “people” works just fine.

@herself @JohnPhilipin Yes, to the "consumers" vs "people" bugbear. In fact I would go a stage further and say that those who are call "cosumers" are "people." In my opinion, once you demote people to consumers they just become objects, and objects are much easier to toss aside or reduce to statistics.

@herself I write about diets and food a bit and have come to hate calling people who eat consumers. But ...

@jeremycherfas technically with food you are consuming, hehe. ;)

@crossingthethreshold @johnphilpin I totally agree. It reduces people to their quality of consumption.

@herself That’s the problem right there. The term has been hijacked.

@herself @crossingthethreshold

People

// @jeremycherfas

Once more with feeling ...

@herself A belated wow, great, love it!

Also, Tarot and Oulipo in the same essay? You are my people! I’ve been a lifelong advocate for chance operations as part of the creative process; with only a little modification, I think a lot of what you say is applicable to other genres, too, especially poetry.

My favorite decks are the Rider, the Marseilles, and the quirky Morgan’s Tarot, which I’ve loved ever since encountering it in the mid-80s. Eno’s Oblique Strategies is another excellent tool to shake things up.

@rnv omg, I adore oblique strategies! Our people, indeed! I love the random and the chaotic, and also looking at methods for bringing back sense from the madness, haha!

@JohnPhilpin I love that.

@rnv we talked a while back on Oulipo, I think. We were discussing using libraries, and book spines, to generate weird titles and ideas? :))

@herself ohhh yeah... Probably when I was doing those book spine poems last year.

@rnv I love those. Oo, going to go raid my bookshelf.

@herself Thanks! — they were so much fun to put together. This post traces the lineage of the form.

@rnv Thanks for that link! Definitely interested in chasing up those two writers...