Thanks. No Really, I Mean It
Picture a frosty gin and tonic here in about an hour and a half If you’ve seen some recent posts of mine, you might suspect I’ve been having a peculiar time in the Bahamas. I have the unique skill set...
View ArticleWhen Your Mind Cracks in Half, Play Ball!
Koufax Pitches to Mays—Can't We All Just Get Along?F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain...
View ArticleWords in the Brain: Make Them Wave Rather Than Writhe
Let’s imagine you were hungry for some syllables, so you walked over to your yard’s word tree. Word tree fruit always hangs in clusters of three, so you pick a triad with your left, and one with your...
View ArticleThe Transient, Enduring, Gone-But-Forever-Now Plums
For the last six or seven years, I’ve thought the plum tree in our yard was a goner. The tree would produce another season’s worth of sweet, juicy fruit, and in the picking, I’d see the deep, dry...
View ArticleIf There’s a Fall, Will There Be Bruises?
Stone Sleight-of-Hand, Big Sur Style A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long. —e.e. cummings...
View ArticleBook Trailer, Whoo Daddy, Is This a Book Trailer
In these days of fancy-schmancy videos and book trailers, I get back to the basics. Book. Trailer. (Even two trailers.)
View ArticleGertrude Stein’s Mustache (or Goodbye 2012)
I predict I’ll have lunch soon, and in 2013 too Much as I want to steal from Willy the Shake, and employ purple phrasings like “the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces” to map the mental...
View ArticleDribbling Metaphors (and Other Sporting Pursuits)
A Grammar Coach Works with a Recalcitrant Verb It’s easy to tire of the exhausted sports metaphor: “He dropped the ball; it’s in your court; that was a slam dunk; we had to punt.” Most clichés have...
View ArticleMixing Martinis, Grammar, the Past and the Future
As Magritte might have said, this is not a martini. This is the future. My parents offered me a sip of a martini when I was seven or eight years old. I recall recoiling in disgust from its sharp,...
View ArticleTake a Punctuation Mark to Lunch
A comma, a period and a semicolon walk into a bar … oh, wait! I can’t finish the joke; I forget how it’s punctuated. Wow, tough crowd. But punctuation’s no joke, my friends—each punctuation mark has a...
View ArticleThe Viking Origin of Editing
As a historian who relies exclusively on lies, only I can sufficiently explain that Vikings were the original editors. And effective editors they were. Please view the film below, where I let the world...
View ArticleWithout An Address, You Can’t Go Home
Photo by Kevin Connors When I lived in Las Vegas, my title at United Parcel Service was “Bad Address Clerk.” Because Vegas is a town of drifters, grifters and shifters of identity, packages would...
View ArticleTequila and Cookies: Writing Perks to Push Your Pages
Hold on cookie fiend—you have to finish that chapter first! As I sat hunched in my dank writing grotto, and tried to figure out a way to move my mouse so that the 40-pound chains that kept me at my...
View ArticlePsychobilly Cadillacs and Sweaty Island Tales
photo by Wikipedia Hope I don’t seem like a stealthy weasel by luring you to this solemn site for a blog post only to send you away willy-nilly on the wings of links, but I had a couple of fun pieces...
View ArticleFeeling a Word’s Curves—Oh, the Ecstasy!
Writers can have a volatile relationship with words, often loving the little darlings when they line up in convivial cooperation. Sometimes words supply delight even when sentence forms are abused to...
View ArticleIf Woody Allen Was a Marketing Copywriter
I’m a guy who likes a well-turned aside, the parenthetical phrase. (Admit it—you find the curves on a pair of parentheses sexy too.) One fun example is the elocution that made Jimmy Stewart famous....
View ArticleParanoid Bell Peppers and Other Writing Prompts
Writing prompts are small sparklers that can light up corners of your writing mind, corners that might remain dark without the nudge. Prompts can be so completely off the wall—”Describe how your...
View ArticleCaution: This Fiction Contains Pulp
My last post was about how writing prompts can spread some salsa on your keyboard to get your writing moving. In checking out some of the writing prompt sites, I found this prompt contest, which...
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