#creative writer

I'm serious. Please write it. If you need a sign to start, continue, or whatever is inbetween, this is it. Go do it.

I spent the past couple weeks indulging myself in some BookTok recommendations. While some were indeed good (Kings of Sin, my beloved), some were just...I don't need to finish my sentence there.

I DNF'd some books for the first time since I read Lord of the Flies (sorry Golding, you put me to sleep with your descriptions) and I powered through others in hopes that they would eventually get better. The general consensus I ended up getting was that I could not understand for the fucking life of me how these books got published. The writing in some of them was no better than that of a 2010s teen writing Maximum Ride fic on Wattpad for the first time, with the characterization abysmal enough to match.

I don't want to knock any specific author or book here, because I will concede one thing: they finished their books. They got them published. They're successful. For that, I commend them, because I'm still on my way there myself and I can't take that away from them. Jolly good show.

But that brings me to my point: if they can do it, YOU absolutely can do it too.

If some of these Amazon and NYT bestsellers can have prose on a Wattpad level with characters that have enough poorly-written cognitive dissonance to make Deadpool or Walter White jealous, your fleshed out, deeply intuitive, and remarkably creative epic can sit right alongside them no problem. Whether you're writing the next GoT or a romantic slice-of-life, there is a not a goddamn thing on this planet stopping you from rolling up with the big dogs.

If these guys can do it, so can you.

So, stop telling yourself you can't. Stop letting other people tell you you can't. Stop comparing yourself to these authors who, respectfully and bluntly, can't write for shit (or at least need to fire their fucking editors, good lord).

WRITE YOUR DAMN BOOK. PLEASE. WE NEED IT.

szigetingy creative writing | The Late Harvest

A woman who loves in the later season of her life does not love with the urgency of spring. She loves with the quiet knowledge of autumn – deep, generous, and unafraid of time. She has already walked through many gardens. She has known the wild blooming of first love, the fierce storms of passion, the long winters of loss. She has seen hearts break and mend. She has learned that desire, though still alive, is no longer a fire that consumes everything in its path. It has become a steady flame – warm, enduring, respectful of the night.In this mature love, she offers not the whole untouched sky of her youth, but a richer, more layered sky – one that has known both brilliant sunrises and heavy, starless evenings. She brings scars she no longer hides. She brings laughter lines etched by decades of joy and sorrow. She brings a body that has softened, yet carries within it a profound, almost sacred memory of touch, of birth, of survival.She no longer loves to complete herself.

She loves because she finally understands what it means to stand whole beside another whole person. There is a beautiful calm in this. The trembling questions of “Will you stay?” have been replaced by a deeper knowing: “I choose to walk with you for as long as the road allows.”Her love now has the texture of late sunlight on old wooden floors – golden, warm, gentle on the eyes. She has learned the art of presence. She listens not only with her ears but with the accumulated wisdom of her entire being. She touches with hands that know both strength and fragility. When she looks at her beloved, she sees not an ideal, but a fellow traveler – someone who also carries the marks of time, someone whose imperfections no longer frighten her, but move her to tenderness.There is sensuality in this love, but of a different kind. It is slower, more attentive. It lingers in long mornings, in shared silences, in the way fingers trace familiar skin with gratitude rather than hunger. It understands that true intimacy often lives in the ordinary: in making tea together, in reading side by side, in laughing at old jokes, in holding one another when the world feels heavy. She knows this love may not last forever.

Death, illness, or the simple turning of life’s wheel may one day separate them. This knowledge does not make her love smaller. It makes it larger – more precious, more deliberate. Every shared day feels like a quiet miracle. Every gentle kiss carries the awareness of how rare and fleeting such closeness truly is. A woman loving in her mature years does not ask the universe for perfection.

She asks only for honesty, for kindness, for the courage to remain open even when the heart has been wounded before. And in return, she gives a love that is no longer trying to prove anything. It simply is – deep as the earth, steady as the slow turning of seasons, luminous as the last warm light of a long summer evening. This is perhaps the most beautiful love of all.

Not because it is without pain or shadow, but because it has survived them. It has become wise. It has become gentle without becoming weak. It has become light without forgetting the darkness it once passed through.

The Quiet Flame

In later life, a woman’s love becomes like an old lighthouse standing on a rocky coast. It no longer needs to burn wildly to be seen. Its light is steady, patient, and deeply knowing. It has learned that the greatest gift she can offer is not youthful passion, but peaceful presence – the rare ability to truly see another soul and say without words: “I am here. I see you. I choose you, even now, especially now.”

My name will stay there, upon your lips and inside your soul.

 Welcome to our 12th Spotlight Of The Week! This week’s writer is . . .