Red Room Where the Writers Are

Here's another reason we love working at Red Room: Our jobs require reading the superb writing our community shares with us. Last Friday, for instance, one of the items on our collective to-do list here at Red Room HQ was "Read Red Room blog-topic-of-the-week entries." What a treat!

We had asked the entire Red Room community to blog on one topic: "What are your obsessions? Your passions? Your fixations?" And the collected entries are a wondrous peek into the lives of almost 100 Red Room members. Some entries are hilarious, some are profound, and some are, well, strange--deliciously so. We loved them all. Thank you to everyone who participated. To quote our fearless leader, Red Room CEO and founder Ivory Madison, after she read these blog posts: "What an amazing community we have." You inspire us.

Choosing a handful of entries to feature was difficult--here are just a few of the blog posts that made us say, "Wow."

• As you might expect, many of the entries were about writing and words. In the first blog entry we're featuring, Tanya Egan Gibson discusses her passion for metafiction, as exemplified by a Sesame Street character in one of her four-year-old daughter's favorite books. Read "The Monster at the End of This Blog."

• In this entry that any lover of words will identify with, John Parker Oughton discusses his passion for words. Read "Say the Word and Be Like Me."
• Lynda Fitzgerald compares writing a novel to falling in love in her entry. Read "What Is My Passion?"
• In this wonderfully quirky entry, Farzana Versey discusses character development, dust mites, and the space under her bed. Read "Caprice, Characters and Voyeurism."
• But writers have obsessions other than writing, of course. Mark F. DeWitt explains his passion for music. Read "Lifelong Obsession with Music."
• Would a discussion of obsessions be complete without the voice of a Trekkie? We thought not. Read Shefali Shah Choksi's "Notes from a Trekkie's Quadrant."
• Vicki Larson has the same fixation as pop star Shakira. Or does she? Read her very funny obsession confession, "Taking a Bite Out of My Obsession."
• Diane Lockward explains why her poetry is often about fruit. Read "Fruit Fix: My Obsession"
• Lisa Threadgill describes her obsession with measuring up to a woman she regards as a hero. Read "My Mother, the Yardstick, and the Feminine Hero."
• In his entry, Mehrdad Balali describes his obsession with meeting an executioner--and he tells a powerful story about the torturer in his family. Read "If the Heart Is Compassionate, the Hand Fails!"
• And Lisa Gale Garrigues describes how she is obsessed with both everything and nothing in her exuberant entry. Read "Obsession. Passion. Fixation."

There are many more entries to read--and we hope you'll peruse them all. You may find something new to obsess about in these pages.