An Interlude with a Ukelele

Late night insomniac thoughts . . . I’ve got the “vacation’s over and my brain is still packed” blues— I’d take off another week, but what would be the use When I go to buy the ticket, my brainless self would have to choose Between a week in Minnesota or the beach in Newport News.

Writing Exercise: One-Word Response

Another Facebook quiz. Can you summarize your answers in one word that delivers any meaning to the person reading them? It’s actually not just a time-waster—it can get you thinking about more specific, more vivid words to use instead of the string of qualifiers we’d fall back on when we don’t have to take the

Vacation Writing

I have a magnificent schedule. The combination of self-employment and shared custody mean a week of predictable variety: good solid blocks of interaction with all kinds of people from academics honing an argument to ten-year-old soccer players. I can be on any committee that meets on Wednesday nights and have regular Girls Night Out Without

The Fifty-Thousand-Word Challenge

A writing group in New Zealand set up a challenge like National Novel Writing Month in their hemisphere’s fall. The Southern Cross Novel Challenge, or SoCNoC, organized things a little more loosely than NaNoWriMo—you didn’t have to start from scratch, or work on a single project to add up to 50,000 words—but it was a

Point/Counterpoint

You may be old enough to remember the granddaddy of shows like Firing Line: on Point/Counterpoint, two old guys squared off every week over a current issue. Nowadays the shows don’t bother to have Counterpoint take part in the argument, but I was reminded of the old format when I think of two sources of