Guest Post and Giveaway with Matt and FJR

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How does writing fulfill you in your life?

F.J.R. Titchenell Head shotFiona:

It’s hard to answer this without creative use of understatement. Writing is in the same arena with eating and breathing in terms of how integral it is to my existence.

Living through a single reality without imagined alternatives sounds to me like living with my head wrapped in soundproofing foam.

Stories are the best way I know to look at that reality, examine its parts, analyze its potential, figure out how and where and why we find meaning in it. I’ve always known I needed to be part of making the stories.

Okay, putting aside sweeping, dramatic, ethereal reasons for writing, it is in fact a calling that makes everything else in life easier and more interesting and meaningful, because everything is research. Everything I see and hear and experience goes into storage for writing material later. So when I’m having a bad day, at least I’m spending it gathering details of characters’ future bad days, and thinking of ways to describe or joke about whatever’s bothering me.

So how does my writing make my life better? By making my life into something that makes my writing better.

MattCarterImageMatt:

I’ve always had an active imagination. As a kid it usually manifested itself by making me absolutely terrified of anything I didn’t know or understand or that TV told me to be afraid of (since, being a little kid, TV was kind of my god at the time). It wasn’t until I started to grow up and really get into reading that I realized that I could use a lot of this constantly active imagination to mold a lot of my crazier ideas into stories, which was a pretty good outlet for getting them out of my head, since these ideas tend to get cluttered at times. For this reason alone, I honestly could not see a world without writing. I could see a world with my head potentially popping like a balloon, but not a world without writing.

However nice it may be not seeing my head explode like something in a Gallagher routine, I think the part I really love about writing is just entertaining people. I love to make people laugh, cry and scream (for good reasons). I love to transport people to other worlds, to get them to forget about the world for just a few minutes while taking a look into my oft-twisted brain. At heart I’m a storyteller, and though I’d write even if I was the last person on Earth, I just live to see people’s reactions to my work, good, bad and otherwise (though more good than bad is always nice).

Check out their latest book, Splinters, here:

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