Jake Ratcliff

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Ira Glass

Neil Gaiman
“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”
Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections

Patrick Rothfuss
“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”
Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

John Steinbeck
“You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.”
John Steinbeck, East of Eden

50920 Beta Reader Group — 29861 members — last activity 12 hours, 35 min ago
A place to connect writers with beta readers. A cliche is just one of the things to look out for while writing. They can slip in unnoticed and ruin a ...more
185313 Author Discussions — 61 members — last activity May 26, 2021 09:25PM
In 2015 I made a BookTube channel and started a series of videos called Author Discussions. This series led to me buddy reading one different Roald D ...more
183874 The Passage trilogy readalong — 491 members — last activity Sep 21, 2021 06:27AM
Join us as we read (or re-read) The Passage and The Twelve ahead of the release of the final part of Justin Cronin’s trilogy The City of Mirrors this ...more
167512 World, Writing, Wealth — 4847 members — last activity 3 hours, 48 min ago
Friends, would you care to partake in a learned discussion of current events, the global economy, writing, selling, film, and reading? Then gift us wi ...more
1185664 TWN Goodreads — 2 members — last activity Mar 27, 2022 01:13PM
Official Goodreads group for Twitch Writer's Network https://bit.ly/TWNDiscord ...more
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Nadir S...
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Beth
1 book | 1 friend

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