What’s Mine is Yours

So the other night as we finish dinner, I pick up my empty tea mug and head to stove to put the kettle on. “Can I have some tea, too?” my husband asks. “Sure. Where’s your mug?” He points to the one in my hand. “I think that one’s mine.” “Nope. Yours is probably upstairs.” [...]

Words: They’re Not Just for Writing Anymore

One of my chittie peeps found an awesome site where you can create Wordles. What is a Wordle, you ask? Well, I didn’t know either.  Turns out what a Wordle is– is HIGHLY COOL! You can paste or type in passages of text or have Wordle grab it from a blog feed if that’s your [...]

Okay, You Writer Types! Challenge Time!

A friend of mine from an online community I belong to posted this fun little quiz there for our amusement. So, words are your tools, eh? Well, let’s see what kind of command over language do you really have! I got 61 the first time through, and it took me half a dozen tries over [...]

Critical Choices: Making Every Word Count

Yesterday, my husband and I had dinner out.  As we perused the menu, we took in the evening’s entertainment, which was provided by two child-sized diners. A little girl, about 3, in overalls, and her 5-year-old brother were careening in reckless circles from the dining room, through the bar and back again. During the fourth [...]

Going with the Flow

Today, as I drove to pick up California rolls for dinner, I was rocking out to Nirvana. I remembered the first time I ever heard Smells Like Teen Spirit. I was in high school, cruising with my sister. She had already mainlined the song after taping it off the radio and knew all the words [...]

Open to Interpretation

I saw Juno last night with my husband and enjoyed it immensely. The main character’s repeated questioning of “‘Sexually active’… what does that even mean?” reminded me of an incident during medical school. During a rotation in the ER, one of the medical students I was working with saw a teenage girl who came in [...]

Progression

I am learning lots of things as I continue in this quest to finish a novel. For one thing, I have learned what a “word war” is. Essentially, it is a contest for a group of people like myself who are writing novels to compete on who can write the most words for their story [...]