External Stimuli Archives - Hillary DePiano

A Writer’s Guide to Resistance: how to keep writing in a world gone mad

Posted by Hillary DePiano on Jul 30, 2018 in External Stimuli, On Writing: Craft and Commiseration | 0 comments

No, it’s not just you. It is really freaking hard to write right now. The world has gone mad, everything is terrible and all that continuous fear and rage and stress makes it really hard to focus on anything, much less fiction. Creatives, like writers, are particularly hit by this because that same empathy that makes us able to get into the skin of a...

I’m in the market for a new desk lamp. Preferable one that doesn’t randomly burst into flame.

Posted by Hillary DePiano on Mar 12, 2018 in External Stimuli, Personally... | 0 comments

I’ve been using the same desk lamp since middle school. It’s the world’s most generic black desk lamp with little cubbies on the bottom for paper clips and mouse skulls or whatever people keep in there. I’ve used it this long because it’s perfectly serviceable apart from the fact that the shade part is made from some kind of...

The Great Kermit Kerfuffle

Posted by Hillary DePiano on Jul 13, 2017 in External Stimuli | 0 comments

There was drama in the world of Muppets this week. Steve Whitmire, the puppeteer that Jim Henson himself personally trained and picked to succeed him in the role of Kermit the Frog, one of two original Muppet performers left, is no longer with the Muppets. Kermit has been recast to (as?) puppeteer Matt Vogel. Dramatic as it is but then a blog post...

Settling

Posted by Hillary DePiano on Jun 5, 2017 in External Stimuli, Personally... | 0 comments

Having bid our official farewell to Old House (as my 4 year old calls it), it’s time to talk a bit about New House. To start with, it’s lovely and has much to recommend it, though there are also a fair amount of headaches we knew were coming because it’s an old house (irony that the house we call New House is older than the house we call...

A farewell to Old House

Posted by Hillary DePiano on May 29, 2017 in External Stimuli, Personally... | 0 comments

When my husband and I were first looking for our first house, we were dead set against townhouses. Every house looking the same, no real yards, no thank you. Then we found this magic townhouse on a dead end and changed our minds. Because while it looked like a townhouse from the outside and benefitted from all the amenities and outdoor maintenance of a...

February 2017: Breakdowns, Boxes and a Baby

Posted by Hillary DePiano on Mar 4, 2017 in External Stimuli, Word Count Updates and Writing Goals | 1 comment

I haven’t talked about this online for a variety of reasons but you should know that all this time I’ve been blogging about this insanely stressful series of months I’ve been having, there’s been an additional complication on top of everything else making it all that much harder. Namely, that while I was packing up our house of 11...