iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Colleen Morrissey

Cottonwood Magazine @cottonwoodku.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Cottonwood will reopen for prose submissions on July 15. Send us your best original fiction and CNF!

Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

In #lfk or #KC for the summer and looking to jumpstart your writing? Enroll in my “Finding Your Writing Practice” class at the Lawrence Arts Center! Available on 2 different nights for your writerly convenience. ✍️ lawrenceartscenter.org

Oftentimes, the hardest part of writing is just getting started. Find your ideal writing ritual in this class by experimenting with prompts, journaling, dictation, and other jumpstart skills to help you craft your fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. Class times listed.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

My toddler seems to be in the midst of dropping her nap (boo), but the one consolation is that I can listen to her babble over the monitor as she decidedly does not sleep at naptime. Today, I heard, amidst unidentifiable syllables, "I'm not the milk, and the milk's not me! I'm MICKEY!"

Illustration from a children's fantasy book showing a little boy emerging from cake batter.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

In speaking of her older cousin today, my 2-year-old remarked, "She has necklace teeth." Necklace teeth? we asked. Yes, necklace teeth. Then, I realized: Braces. Her cousin wears braces. I love it.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Today a fellow parent asked me if I'd uploaded my child's photo to an AI model so I could see what she'd look like as a teenager, and I had to act as though that weren't the most horrifying thing I'd ever heard

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Totally thrilled that my personal essay "Inborn" will soon be available @electricliterature.com ! A dream pub!

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

A weird realization while editing: I no longer need to clarify how a character researched something "on the internet" or "online" because that is the default, assumed method/avenue. I am old.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

Send me your best prose by Valentine’s! ❤️

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 04/01/2026

Just finished TENTH OF DECEMBER, have come to the totally unoriginal conclusion that George Saunders is prob the greatest living American writer.🤷‍♀️ Generically, his style is not one I usually enjoy (heavily voice-driven and spare on setting) but he's just so good at doing it with heart, I must stan.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

I love how tech guys just keep making the internet worse. Like, yeah, let's make this place uninhabitable. Let's drive people back to touching grass and consuming analogue media because the internet is so unpleasant and slop-filled. I'm rooting for you, kings.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Spent a few hours yesterday researching and writing out what two characters are seeing/encountering on a long train ride followed by a walk through downtown Chicago to get to Northerly Island. Then, later that day, while doing an errand, I remembered… They have a car. THEY HAVE A FUCKING CAR.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

When we were first dating, my husband and I amused ourselves by rewriting "Must be Santa" as "Must be Satan." Now our toddler loves the original song, and I have to work SO HARD not to sing, WHO'S COMING FOR US WHEN WE'RE DEAD? SATAN'S COMING FOR US WHEN WE'RE DEAD!

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

Snowstorm on campus today led to closure around noon, and as I was leaving my building, I encountered 2 under-dressed French students filming the snow with appalled delight, and I was glad of my minuscule French that allowed me to immediately understand when one shouted, "ça c'est foutu!"

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

I appreciate that there's a whole subgenre of holiday music that's basically "it's cold outside, guess it's time to fuck"

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

Sometimes, revising sucks, but sometimes it feels like this:

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

Rewatching The Craft for the umpteenth time, and I know I'm not the first to say it, but--justice for Nancy.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

Me @ me writing tense, climactic dialogue in which one character disillusions another:

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

My 2-year-old daughter has become obsessed with witches, so yeah you could say I'm a great mom

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Reposted by Colleen Morrissey

Keith W. Dickinson @keithwdickinson.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

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Tajja Isen @tajjaisen.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

I spent the summer reporting this essay on why it seems harder than ever to sell a book right now—especially if it isn't a debut and comes with the dreaded "sales track." I'm grateful to the writers, agents, editors, publishers & experts who spoke to me for this piece: thewalrus.ca/the-publishi...

thewalrus.ca

The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem | The Walrus

Companies keep betting on the next bestseller. Literature is poorer for it

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Reposted by Colleen Morrissey

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 23/09/2025

this is gaslighting, plain and simple. No, it's not the worker producing workslop, it's the fucking AI!

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

Had a dream where an undergraduate creative writing class read the first chapters of my WIP and absolutely hated it, with some even finding it offensive, so, you know, I’m closing in on finishing a first draft

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Reposted by Colleen Morrissey

Michael "Fallen Coffee Pot of Shadows" Senters the Sigillite:ABD @mikesenters.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

There are very, VERY few people who are equipped to talk about this shooter correctly given the brainrot written on the shell casing. You have to understand so much of online culture to get it and also understand how that culture is both connected to and separate from real world ideological spaces

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Had a lovely (and not pretentious) convo with a barista today about whether hot shots of espresso or cold brew is better for iced lattes, and this is why I love indie coffee shops. This guy full-on cared that I had the best beverage possible. (Java Break in Lawrence, KS btw)

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Reposted by Colleen Morrissey

🎃Darin S Pumpkins🎃 @darinself.com · 02/09/2025

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

What people think writing is: Hunching over your desk and furiously scribbling or typing out the burning song of your soul. What writing actually is: Staring into space and googling definitions of words you already know but just want to make sure you actually know.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Staring down another whole chapter that will need to be cut from my WIP.

Wesley Snipes pointing a gun with tears streaking down his face, a stoic mask of an expression hiding his torment.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

My Depression-born, farm-raised, youngest-of-eight-children grandma used to make me bread and butter for a snack. That's it. Bread and butter. And I DEFY you to come up with a better savory snack.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

Watching Disney’s Beauty and the Beast with my 2 y.o. daughter, getting to the part where wolves chase Maurice and am a bit concerned it will be too scary…My daughter giggles with delight when the wolves bite Maurice’s foot. ☠️

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

Send me your prose, folks! (Beginning Sept. 1)

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

Wrote a scene set here today. I miss Chicago.

A view of an autumnal garden outside the Art Institute of Chicago, looking over an empty fountain at the greened-bronze sculpture Spirit of the Great Lakes, which depicts five robed women bearing shell basins that pour into each other.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

With no direction from me, my toddler has defaulted to calling every character, stuffed animal, etc. she/her and I’m like hell yeah sister

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 10/08/2025

I watched FRIENDSHIP last night and it was the funniest movie I have seen in AGES. I can't stop thinking about what an apt commentary on masculinity (and dare I say the "male loneliness epidemic") it is. And, of course, just our lonely age in general.

media.tenor.com

a man in a brown jacket says you all accepted me way too fast

ALT: a man in a brown jacket says you all accepted me way too fast

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Reposted by Colleen Morrissey

Briony Neilson @brionyneilson.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

Daguerreotype image of the hand of fishing boat captain and slavery abolitionist Jonathan Walker showing the “SS” (for “Slave Stealer”) that the US Govt branded on his palm after he tried in 1844 to help runaway slaves in Florida find freedom in the West Indies (Massachusetts Historical Society) 🗃

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Reposted by Colleen Morrissey

Bob Kopp @bobkopp.net · 08/08/2025

“A legitimate PhD-level expert in anything,” they said. “Show me a diagram of the US presidents since FDR, with their names and years in office under their photos,” I said.

A GPT-5 generated diagram of US presidents since Franklin D. “Roesevelt” to “Goorge W Bush”, “Baruck Obama” and Donald Trump. No George HW Bush (though Ronald Reagan looks a fair bit like him), LBJ, or Joe Biden.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 08/08/2025

Been seeing a lot of AI-generated, fraudulent "pin-ups" in antique stores of late. A pox on the people who have found yet another way to both defraud customers while simultaneously picking at Marilyn Monroe's corpse.

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Reposted by Colleen Morrissey

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 08/08/2025

it’s basically trite to note at this point but if this were any other president, and certainly a democrat, spending a ton of money to gild the white house would be a legit scandal

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Reposted by Colleen Morrissey

Natalia Cecire @ncecire.bsky.social · 07/08/2025

The way these guys talk about PhDs is like the tv shows where a character is said to have three PhDs to show you they're smart. Every time they talk about it they just keep showing they have no idea what expertise is

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 07/08/2025

There’s hell and then there’s converting a thrice-weekly class into a twice-weekly class

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Reposted by Colleen Morrissey

Kristen Hanley Cardozo @khandozo.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

What kills me about people claiming they “can’t” is that of course they can but brainstorming is a skill and if you don’t exercise that muscle, it atrophies. Using an LLM to brainstorm will make you worse at brainstorming.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

I have jury duty the last 2 weeks of my summer, so instead of revenge bedtime procrastinating, I'm revenge semester-prep procrastinating.

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Reposted by Colleen Morrissey

Glen O'Hara @gsoh31.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

Decades of mechanistic talk about university degrees as if they were bundles of 'skills' and 'prep' are about to be proved completely wrong (obviously). Want to get a real boost? Do History or English.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

Leaving an editing note for future me because I wrote a whole scene forgetting that it takes place in December in Chicago: "REMEMBER, IT'S COLD AF"

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

Me, a literary fiction writer, attempting to write a fight scene:

Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons, sitting at the back of an empty bus, chuckling and saying, "I'm in danger."

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

Discovered I can kind of write while sitting next to my 2-year-old on the couch as long as I open her own document so she can have a "turn" every few minutes. I won't show you my WIP, but here's hers: “ ‘ \’ :\’/;,[,[p\\\\\\\’.,>>>>>>> ]=[[ [[[[[ [[[[[[[ [[

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Reposted by Colleen Morrissey

Indie Book Spotlight @bookspotlight.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

Let’s freaking gooooooo 💪

A California federal judge ruled Thursday that three authors suing Anthropic over copyright infringement can bring a class action lawsuit representing all U.S. writers whose work was allegedly downloaded from libraries of pirated works.

The filing alleges that Anthropic, the Amazon-backed OpenAI competitor behind the chatbot Claude, “violated the Copyright Act by doing Napster-style downloading of millions of works.” It alleges that the company downloaded as many as seven million copies of books from libraries of pirated works.

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

Writers, you ever have a dream where you think, while still within it, “wow, this is a great story, I have to write it when I wake up,” then you wake up and lol no it isn’t?

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Colleen Morrissey @colleenmoz.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

Pity me: Had to look through a looksmaxxing forum for writing research today.

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Frances “Poet Laureate of the Robot Alliance” Klein @fklein907.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

In the coming days you’re gonna see a lot of “people in red states deserve what they voted for” rhetoric, so just a reminder that there are a lot of us here in “red” states that didn’t vote for this, and will suffer anyway

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