The Bin

Happy Friday Fun-Day, Scrap Binners! And happy last night of Hanukkah to those who celebrate! It’s hard to believe that we’re already reaching the end of those eight holy nights, six days away from Yule and the Winter Solstice, and ten days away from Christmas. With all these winter holidays going on, I think it’s time for another holiday-themed Friday Fun-Day writing prompt. This time, I want to turn the spotlight on the big man himself: Santa Claus.

We’ve seen a million different stories—especially movies and TV specials—starring Santa Claus: The Year Without a Santa Claus, Fred Claus, and Disney+’s latest streaming sensation, The Santa Clauses. Honestly, at this time of year, there is no shortage of the cookie-eating, gift-giving, home intruder. It can get a bit tedious to see so many different versions of the man in the red suit year after year, especially if you have children.

However, there is a plus side to this dilemma: his origins, as a character, remain an enigma. We do have the historical origins with Saint Nicholas, even if those are questionable as well. As a character, though, Santa Claus has a wide variety of origins. Whether he’s a mythical being, a man who became an immortal being because of his good deeds, or a man who picked up the mantel in a long line of red-suited gift-givers, Santa Claus’s roots are forever changing.

That’s what I want you to do with today’s writing prompt. Explore Santa Claus’s origins. All myths have their beginnings—what are Santa Claus’s?

Where was he born? Does he have a family? How did he start giving gifts to children? How did he start breaking into houses without facing any backlash? Who exactly are the elves, and how did Santa Claus fall in with them? Why did Santa Claus choose to go to the North Pole, and how does he survive up there?

The questions are limitless.

Since the questions are limitless, give yourself five minutes to jot down notes and let your imagination run wild. Then use these notes to create a short story about the origins of Santa Claus. The story can be a whimsical children’s story, like “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, or a hysterical yet sometimes tragic story of familial dysfunction, like Fred Claus. The only real limit here—beyond the five minutes for your notes—is your creativity.

I highly encourage you to make Santa Claus as well-rounded a character as possible. Remember, this is an exercise in seeing how well you can take an already flat character—a well-known one, at that—and make him into someone with a truly fleshed-out background. However, don’t forget to have fun with it. It is your story, your version of Christmas, after all.

Share your vision with the world!

Feel free to share your experience with this exercise and the resulting short story in the comments below. For an extra writing prompt, don’t forget to join my paid Patreon membership at this link.

Happy holidays to all!

My mom got me the best holiday gift possible: a Cameo video from Mark Sheppard, the genius actor behind Supernatural’s Crowley. It’s easy to say that this gift did not just make my day or my week; it made my year. (For those who don’t know, I am a big Supernatural fan, especially Crowley.) Yet it’s not just the fact that it was Mark Sheppard who appeared in the video that made it so special. It was the message that he left for me that really lifted me out of the doldrums.

My mom told Mark Sheppard that I was having writer’s block. And it’s true. I’ve been having the worst writer’s block of my life recently. I’m especially having a hard time writing for my ghostwriting project. But Mark Sheppard reminded me of a basic truth of writing: writers just have to write, even if it turns out to be rubbish.

It’s advice that we, as writers, hear often. Just sit down and write. It doesn’t matter if it’s rubbish, so long as you get some writing done. However, that’s easier said than done.

Oftentimes, we say it’s because we don’t have time. Most of us have jobs outside of our writing, you know. We also have our families and social obligations, not to mention when we get sick (I just recently got over Covid myself). Yet even when we do have the time, we still can’t seem to find the inspiration. There’s too much noise, too many social media posts to get caught up on, too many TV shows and movies and books to dive into, too many distractions…

The truth, though, actually goes much deeper than that.

We are afraid of the rubbish.

Many of us writers are perfectionists. You could say that all artists are. We have a paralyzing fear of our writing not turning out perfectly the first time that we get it down onto paper, and so we just don’t write anything at all. Alternatively, we do write something, and then we rewrite that little something again and again and again, rather than marching forth with the rest of the piece.

There’s something that we need to realize, though: there’s no such thing as a perfect first draft. In fact, all first drafts are probably rubbish. That’s why we get feedback, revise, and edit, after we have finished the first draft.

If we want to make it as writers, if we truly want to push past our writer’s blocks, we need to embrace our rubbish, not run away from it. We need to get past the fear of imperfection and just write. Even if it’s just a little bit of rubbish every day, we need to write something.

After all, one word soon becomes two words. Two words become a sentence. A sentence becomes a paragraph, a paragraph becomes a page, a page becomes a chapter, and a chapter becomes a book. It just takes persistence. The polishing of the turd, so to speak, can wait until later.

Yes, we have our obligations that we must tend to before our writing. That is the way of life. However, we should not let a fear of turning out rubbish keep us from writing at all. It is our passion, and we cannot allow anything to stand in the way of us pursuing that passion, let alone ourselves.

Now, in the words of Crowley, let’s go raise some Hell.

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Happy Friday, beloved readers! It’s hard to believe that it’s a little over two weeks until Christmas, huh? And Hanukkah already started last night! (Those are just the holidays that I know of.) It’s hard to believe how quickly the holidays are going by. Hopefully, even with all the hustle and bustle of this time of year, you are taking some time for your writing. Whether you already are or you need some inspiration to help you get started again, here is a writing prompt that will (hopefully) get your writing gears going.

For this prompt, I want to do something to go along with the increasing darkness of winter and to complement my “All Summer in a Day” writing prompt. I’m calling this one the “Eternal Night” writing prompt.

Imagine that, one day, the sun suddenly goes dark, and all electricity goes out. The sun has not died out, but for whatever reason, all light has disappeared from our planet but for the stars and fire. What do you think would happen to humankind? How would we handle being stuck in such a dark, primitive state? Would we panic? Turn on each other? We would come together and try to survive in this brand new world? Or we would just die out, as T.S. Eliot once said, not with a bang, but with a whimper?

Like with the “All Summer in a Day” writing prompt, I want you to spend about five minutes thinking over this scenario and jotting down your notes for it. Then turn it into a short story, piece of microfiction, or a poem. It can be whatever you want–horror, science fiction, fantasy, apocalyptic fiction, whatever fits the notes that you came up with. The only limits are your imagination!

This writing prompt will stretch your imagination. You might even be tempted to go beyond what would happen to humanity to explain why the light went away, which would probably take far more than the five minutes allotted to the note-taking in this exercise. Great! If you feel so compelled, bend the rules of this exercise and let this exercise take you where it will! Remember, these writing prompts are just to get you started writing. There are no strict rules to them, so if you need to be flexible to follow your imagination and creativity, so be it.

Let me know how this exercise turns out for you in the comments below.

For a bonus Friday Fun-Day writing prompt, be sure to join my Patreon page.

Warning: The subject of today’s review, Eternal Love by Nived, contains content of a sexual nature. If you are not over 18 years of age, please leave this page. If you otherwise wish to avoid such subjects, please proceed with caution.

Happy Saturday, everyone! I hope everyone’s having a great weekend. We might still be in a pandemic, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t find ways to entertain ourselves at home. After all, we’re readers and writers—what more could we ask for? Well, in case you want another book to add to your to-read list (and everyone here does), I’m bringing you a review for a fantasy romance novel called Eternal Love by Nived.

Devin Elliot is entering her final year of college with dreams of exploring the world, her camera and her two best friends by her side. Now that years of a horrid on-again/off-again relationship have finally come to an end, she has sworn off women…and dating…for now. Of course, that was before she met the new student: Amirah. The strength of her attraction to this woman is irresistible, embarrassingly so. The more time they spend together, they more that Devin thinks the attraction might be mutual. Whether Amirah is genuine or just using her for pleasure, though, Devin cannot tell. If only Amirah’s abusive boyfriend Todd weren’t in the way.

Yet there’s something else about Amirah, something beyond her seductiveness that seems so familiar. All Devin’s friends gravitate to her, even Devin’s dog likes her, and—wait. What was that language that Grandma Ava was just using to speak to Amirah? The closer the full moon and Devin’s 25th birthday approach, the more it seems that everyone else is in on some big cosmic secret, and Devin is at the center of it all.

From shapeshifters to nymphs, past lives to soul mates, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.

Eternal Love by Nived is an intriguing new take on the typical coming-of-age tale. Rather than taking place when the character is 13, 16, 18, or even 21—all traditional cornerstone ages used in popular coming-of-age fiction—this story uses the more mature age of 25 as the turning point in Devin’s life. Given how more recent generations are making life’s bigger decisions and starting to come into their own around this age—often later—nowadays, I must commend Nived on making the theme much more relatable for today’s Young Adult/New Adult readers. Instead of facing the challenges of finishing high school and going off to college as the “real world” growing up problems, Devin faces finishing college, still not finding love in her mid-20s, and realizing that even at her age, she knows nothing, not even who she is. Nived has successfully shown something that writers are only starting to truly explore with the developing New Adult genre: 18 is not the end-all age of growing into who you are meant to be.

Of course, this socio-cultural implication is not the only thing to love about this book. The main character—in fact, the vast majority of the cast—is unabashedly LGBT+. Moreover, the characters do not hide their sexuality in any way, and the only character that seems to have any issues with it is developed as an overall jerk (to put it very mildly) anyway. These characters are not just in sexual relationships but genuinely in love. There are a couple times when LGBT+ characters act more on sexual instincts that are not really to any emotion, but those moments seem justified by the plot and/or character development of these and/or other characters. The fact that the characters are lesbian or bisexual (perhaps pansexual, but that possibility is never really explored) never feels forced, and the LGBT+ community is just as natural a part of the book as is the heterosexual community. There is acknowledgement that issues could still arise, such as the fact that Devin’s act must open bars that are specifically gay bars and negative comments are made by the jerk male character. Still, that only makes the book feel more realistic while also allowing these characters to feel just normal as the heterosexual characters—as they should be.

Above all else, though, Eternal Love’s best characteristic is its world building. This book has a vivid, imaginative world with strong creative energy. I don’t want to go into too much detail as much of the world building occurs in the second half of the book and I don’t want to give away any spoilers. Nevertheless, I should say that I have never seen such a unique intersection of shapeshifters, portals, cosmic beings, and past lives. I am especially glad to see that the shapeshifters are not canine shapeshifters but feline (for the most part). Popular fiction focuses so much on canine shapeshifters, wolf shifters in particular. Don’t get me wrong; I love wolves and dogs a lot. However, I also love variety in my fiction, and I know that there is much more shifter lore out there than just wolves and other canines. So, seeing that Nived decided to use feline shifters in Eternal Love made me very happy and very eager to read it. I think that Nived has successfully pulled off her own distinct twist on this shapeshifter lore, even more so than making them felines. From their origins to their continuation, she has me fascinated enough to learn more.

Regardless, the book isn’t perfect. The writing itself is, for the most part, solid. Still, it could use another round of editing for consistency in tense since I noticed unjustifiable shifts between past and present tense and some other minor issues. I also noticed that the pacing is a bit awkward. The first half, when the relationships are being built and only one or two fantastical elements are introduced, passes by rather slowly. In contrast, after the fantastical elements are more completely introduced to the story, the narrative pacing picks up rapidly. I felt as though the story was really picking up just as it was ending, in fact. Perhaps, with the world being so intricately build and beautifully complex, more space was needed to develop the second half to its full potential and balance out the pacing of the first half. As it is, it’s almost as though I’m reading two shorter novels, one that deals with the beginning of the relationship and one that deals with the end and begins Devin’s journey of magical self-discovery. They can’t truly be without each other, but right now, they aren’t fully fitting together, either.

There is also an element of the book as a romance novel that some readers might not be comfortable with: sex scenes. As with most stories in this genre, there are both sensual and love-making scenes in Eternal Love. They are always appropriate for the plot and for the development of the characters involved. However, I would have preferred if they could have been a little more spread out throughout the second half of the book. Some of them feel clustered, most likely due to the rush narrative pacing of that section of the book, which does make them feel a little overwhelming. Regardless, they do not hinder the reading experience or take away from the story in any way, so I think that if a reader does not normally have problems with sex scenes, these ones should not stop them from enjoying this book.

All in all, Eternal Love by Nived is a great read. An unexpected combination of fantasy, science fiction, and romance, it has a little bit of something for every speculative fiction lover. Based on the ending, I know that there is more to come, and I can’t wait.

You can buy Eternal Love by Nived as an eBook or in paperback on Amazon. Also be sure to follow the writer on Instagram @nivedthegifted and Twitter @mi_nived.

Do you know of any books I should read? E-mail me at thewritersscrapbin@gmail.com and let me know!

Happy Thursday, readers and writers. It’s sure been a shaky few months, to say the least, huh? All I can say is that whoever wished to be a part of their own apocalyptic fiction story line better find that genie and unwish this fast. Until then, we’ll have to make do with our reality and carry on as normally as we can. For my American readers, that includes filing taxes in time for the new July 15^th deadline. To stay on theme with that deadline, I want to bring you a new review today, this time for a book about everyone’s favorite subject (sarcasm intended): the American tax system. Today’s review is on Rational Tax Reform: Using the Systems Engineering Process to Fix America’s Broken Tax System by Jim Hartung.

Liberal, Conservative, or Moderate, there’s pretty much one thing that all Americans across the political spectrum can agree upon: our tax system is messed up. How? That’s debated—long, loud, and often. We do agree, though, that it’s broken, and we want it fixed. Now. Yet anything worth doing is worth doing right, and that includes the complete reform of our tax system. So, where do we start? Tax break? Tax stimulus? Tax the rich? According to Jim Hartung of Rational Tax Reform, those are just Band-Aids. For the real solution, we must complete an overhaul, not just a quickie resolution to appease the raving masses temporarily. Moreover, we have to find the right execution, and for that, we can no longer turn to politics and policy. We can’t even turn to economics. We must think outside of the box and try something that the bigwigs have never tried before: the Systems Engineering Process.

In Rational Tax Reform: Using the Systems Engineering Process to Fix America’s Broken Tax System, Jim Hartung presents a thorough argument for reforming America’s broken tax system not based on ideology but on facts and logic through a process known as systems engineering, or SE. Hartung takes readers through the SE process as a way to come up with multiple tax reform plans, decide which plan most satisfies our country’s needs, and review the tax system on a regular basis in order to adjust it for America’s ever-evolving needs. To demonstrate the way in which this common sense approach would work, Hartung even details his own plan for tax reform—not the only or even necessarily “right” one, he emphasizes, but one of many viable reforms which could resolve several of our country’s problems in one go.

I am a liberal with liberal parents living in one of California’s few conservative counties where people would much rather shoot first and ask questions later. To say that politics is not one of my favorite topics is an understatement. I have very strong opinions on certain social matters, but with other subjects, I am more willing to look for a compromise based on facts. That is why I find Hartung’s fact-based, rather than ideology-based, approach to taxes so appealing. He uses a method that has been proven time and again by an industry that has countless lives relying on its success (airplanes). With simple, easy-to-understand language, he explains how this same method can be used for the tax system and demonstrates it step-by-step with a viable example based on his own research and several rounds of beta reading/feedback. Most importantly, instead of ignoring or trying to reassign blame when something has gone wrong, as is often the case in ideology-driven politics, Hartung acknowledges catastrophes involved with the use of SE (the Boeing 737 Max crashes) and shows how that is a part of the SE process, not something that disproves it. Honestly, it was just refreshing to see an argument for a tax reform that did not involve degrading anyone based on their income bracket.

As someone with only minimal knowledge of the American tax system, I fully expected this book to be hard for me to follow. I was pleasantly surprised. Everything felt very logical to me, as though the use of SE and many of the ideas in Hartung’s tax reform should have been obvious solutions even before I read this. In fact, it’s very similar to things I have seen used or used myself quite often. SE closely resembles the scientific method as well as the project management template that my high school teachers made us follow during group projects. It’s even like the writer’s process of getting feedback, rewriting, and repeating until the manuscript is ready for editing. The more that I read about SE, the more that I realized it was quite intuitive and so logical that the only surprise is that the government hasn’t used it for policymaking before now.

There are many terms and concepts which I did not know going into this, but thanks to Hartung’s writing and the glossary at the end of this book, the blanks I had were filled in quickly. Several graphs, tables, and examples also helped clear things up for me, and I think that visual learners in particular will appreciate these aids which the author has provided, some from outside sources and some made himself. He also provides multiple visuals just for the fun of it, including political cartoons. While Hartung’s writing is never dry, the topic is still not everyone’s cup of tea, and these fun visuals help rekindle the excitement for those who might struggle staying interested until the end.

If you are looking for a rage-fueled tirade about “liberal snowflakes” or “gun-toting conservatives”, I must emphasize that this book is not for you. Rational Tax Reform is a calm-headed, well-organized work attempting to promote genuine change, and not only in tax reform. After he finishes talking about how SE can work for tax reform and details his own tax reform proposal, Hartung briefly explains how the SE process can be used to resolve America’s twelve most serious problems: healthcare, war and terrorism, climate change, economic inequality, social inequality, the justice system, the immigration policy, education, governance policy, international relations, environmental stability, and, of course, the topic of this book, tax reform. (Note: This book was written and beta read before COVID-19, George Floyd’s murder, and the most recent wave of Black Lives Matter protests, so one must keep that in mind while reading it.) Whether the SE process can truly apply to the other eleven issues as well as it does to tax reform has yet to be seen. I personally have some concerns about the human factor and our ability to set aside our ideologies, biases, and prejudices in these areas to face the true facts so that the SE process can work as it should, but I will remain open-minded.

Overall, I think that Rational Tax Reform by Jim Hartung is the best shot we have at fixing our tax system and our federal budget at the moment. Even if you don’t agree with Hartung’s proposed tax plan, you will find it hard to argue against the use of the SE process. At only 128 pages, it’s a relatively quick read for the subject matter, but you will find yourself returning to it again and again and passing it on so that you can discuss it with those around you.

You can buy Rational Tax Reform as an eBook or in paperback on Amazon. Also make sure to visit Jim Hartung’s website for supplementary information, a seven-minute video, and a free twelve-page booklet (available on PDF).