Category: General Thoughts & Updates

October 17, 2015

Weebly vs. WordPress.com

So. Weebly vs. WordPress.com: a comparison I could have used (but couldn’t really find) several months ago. While many reading this probably are WordPress fans (especially those reading it through WordPress Reader), you may also have seen alluring ads for Weebly on facebook or other social media sites that make it seem awfully tempting. A convenient drag-and-drop interface? Customization without...

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October 13, 2015

Personality Tests: An Exercise in Characterization

Want to test how well you know your character? Russ’s comment on Deathwalker 3.6 made me think of a great characterization exercise: Take a personality test from your character’s perspective. Answer the questions the way your character would and see whether the results agree with how you think of your character (or at least, if they agree as much as you...

Categories Characterization, Plot, & Setting/Creative Process/General Thoughts & Updates/Literary Devices & Writing Techniques Comments: 0

October 11, 2015

Possessive Adjectives Shouldn’t Exist – At Least Not in High School.

Ok, Grammar Nazis, calm down and let me explain. First, for those of you who don’t know, school systems in the U.S. now teach that certain words are called possessive adjectives: my, your, his, her, its, our, and their. When you learned about them growing up, they probably called them possessive pronouns. That makes sense to me. A pronoun takes the...

Categories General Thoughts & Updates/Grammar & Editing Comments: 0

October 8, 2015

Coming from Hitchcock, This Quote Makes Ideas Seem Scary!

The first time I heard someone ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” I was baffled. The concept behind the question confused me. What do you mean where do I get them? Ideas are everywhere! I get them at the grocery when I see someone trying to climb the shelves, I get them in traffic when I catch a glimpse of...

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October 7, 2015

I Must Be Doing Something Right: “Pixar’s Rules of Storytelling” by Readers+Writers Journal

As a writer, I often find that I am a strange combination of extreme arrogance and utter insecurity. One minute, I’m supremely confident in what I’ve written: the next, I’m supremely confident that it’s crap. That’s why it’s very reassuring to find out that a resource I admire agrees with what I’ve written (or, more likely, has said the same thing without ever...

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October 7, 2015

Ideas: Gotta Catch ’em All!

It’s late at night. You’re on the verge of sleep, and you have an idea for a story. It’s dark, and you don’t have any way to write it down. You repeat it in your head a couple of times and drift off sure that you’ll remember in the morning. But you don’t. It doesn’t matter if it’s sleeping, driving,...

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October 4, 2015

Website Woes

I feel like I’ve spent more time working on the technical aspects of running a blog than on my writing this past week. And I write over an hour each day. Cue beating my head against my keyboard (only I won’t because I’d probably break it – the keyboard, not the head). The problem is that I’ve been looking into...

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October 3, 2015

Poetic Origins

Today, I found out that one of my favorite childhood movies, The Man from Snowy River, started with a poem. The story of the ride to capture the brumbies (wild horses) as well as some of the characters and background comes from the 1890 poem “The Man from Snowy River.” Granted, I’m not as impressed with the poem as I...

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October 2, 2015

Poetry In Movies & More

Poetry: using words to combine rhythm and sounds in defiance of the rules of prose. It can be abstract. In can be explicit. It can be bouncy and childlike. It can be driving and adult. Although the term “poet” may never have the same loftiness it once did, poetry is much more powerful and ubiquitous than most of us realize...

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September 30, 2015

To All Writers

Cut to this length (as it usually is), this powerful quote stands on its own as a kind of toast to writers of all kinds. I first chose it because I like that message and because I thought it was an interesting way to introduce the idea of different forms of writing. Once I found the original interview, however, I...

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