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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...

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When 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...

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Words 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...

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The 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...

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If 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...

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Book 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.)

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Gertrude 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...

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Dribbling 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...

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Mixing 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,...

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Take 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...

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The 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...

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Without 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...

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Tequila 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...

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Psychobilly 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...

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Feeling 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...

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If 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....

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Paranoid 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...

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Caution: 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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