Writing the good read
The list of blogs below? They are all folks who are participating in the Freelance Success/Wordcount Blogathon. Some of them will blog daily, like me. Some won’t. A few will drop out altogether. Don’t be judgy. You don’t know what’s going on in their lives. At any rate, take a look at them. All of…
I really should call this “words of the day” because there’s no way I can pick just one word from this week’s book, Horologicon by Mark Forsyth, proprietor of the InkyFool blog. I’ve said before I’m a word geek. Show me a book about words and their origins, or the evolution of language and I’ll…
I didn’t have The Blue Book on my radar at all. But I read a review in the New York Times that talked about the author, AL Kennedy, as most closely akin to Richard Ford, whose book Canada I loved and wrote about previously. So I put it on my list. It sat on the…
I’ve blogged 30 straight days. It’s harder than I ever remember. You know how people say that if a woman remembered the pain of labor and childbirth the race would die out? The Blogathon is like that. I forget every year how hard it is to write every single day. We have a tradition in…
Earlier this month, I wrote about my new-found respect for Phillip Lopate, regarded as one of the best living writers of thepersonal essay. I wanted to expand my knowledge of the genre — and I had never thought of it as that before, but as the way some writers opine on a variety of subjects…
As I play Words with Friends — I have about a dozen games going at any one time — bystanders often hear me muttering the same phrase over and over. It’s such a common refrain that Mr. Right Now says it should be on my headstone. Well it should be a word*. I have other ideas…
Every year during the Blogathon get to explore the word stylings of writers I’ve never read. In some lights, this could be a burden: I have limited time and so many good words to read. But in another light — the one I use to illuminate my life — there can’t be enough good writing…
I’ve been a writer for my entire adult life. I’ve made my living doing nothing else. And as a journalist, I’m pretty confident in what I do. I know how to find sources, interview intelligently, craft a story designed specifically for the audience at hand. If I don’t know something, I know where to look…
The picture above? It’s one of five such bookcases I have in the family room. There are another five up in my room. All are filled nearly edge to edge with books. I have about 30 books sitting on the floor waiting to be filed (fiction downstairs, non-fiction up, alphabetically by author). They will displace…
Once each blogathon, we have a day that I refer to as “the easy day” where we create a word picture using the magnificent Wordle website. Most people do a picture of their blog; last year I did a picture of my favorite e.e. cummings poem, which I couldn’t put into my blog at the…