Where readers, writers, and stories meet.
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending my very first Quinceañera. Our Puerto Rican neighbors planned a beautiful 15th birthday party for their beautiful oldest daughter, and my son was invited to be one of her attendants.
The party decorations were very pretty, with purple ribbons and Quinceañera favors to match Charlene’s amazing purple dress. I was so jealous… my 15th birthday party was nothing like this! Continue reading “My first Quinceañera”
In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I kinda love Pinterest. I have tried a ton of new DIY projects and even make my own homemade laundry detergent now on a regular basis. But Pinterest can be as annoying as it is helpful when pinners fail to pin properly. To combat this problem, I have compiled a short quick-list of tips for properly sharing articles on Pinterest to avoid irritating your followers:
1. Link to the individual blog post, not the blog’s index page. Continue reading “Proper Pinning: How not to irritate your followers on Pinterest”
If you’re a teacher or student (or both, like me,) your head is probably about to explode from all of the recent end-of-year academic activities. So, for today’s Wednesday Writing Prompt, I thought it might be appropriate to pick something fun and light to write about. Of course, if you’re in the mood for deep and dark, you could probably take it that way too. Here goes:
Without looking, reach into a drawer, any drawer, in the room in which you are right this moment. (If you’re in a public place or someone else’s home, you may want to ask for permission first.) Pull out the first item you can get your hands on. Remember, don’t look in the drawer or look for a particular item. Instead, I want you to grab one random item Continue reading “Writing prompt: Pick an object”
In a recent Wednesday Writing Prompt, I asked you to consider what themes and motifs seem to appear regularly in your everyday life. One theme that regularly appears in my life is the concept of “truth.” This has occasionally crossed my mind over the past three years, but finally hit home last week when I discovered that yet another research paper had turned into a discussion of the identification and exploration of universal truths.
I’d been writing a narratological analysis of Elizabeth George Speare’s historical YA novel, The Witch of Blackbird Pond and found that many of the academic resources I was reviewing on historical fiction seem to touch on those aspects of human nature that are largely unchanged from one generation to the next. While this was, by no means, the thesis of any of the research papers I read, it was the one common thread that seemed to weave through all of the pieces. Continue reading “Life is Truth”
If you have a blog, you’ve probably gotten at least one ridiculous spam comment on one of your posts. You know what I’m talking about… those comments that were obviously written by some online Viagra salesperson in Southeast Asia who is sitting at a laptop filtering their spammy comments through Yahoo Babelfish before posting. And what about those comments that have absolutely nothing to do with the post you’ve written? Do these spammers really think we’re this stupid?
Luckily, I use Akismet on my blog, so I don’t have to read too many of those spammy comments. The ones that do occasionally slip through the spam filter are generally pretty funny. Check out this list of the top 7 ridiculous spam comments received on my blog, and you’ll see what I mean: Continue reading “Write On the World Presents: Top 7 Spam Comments”
Has this ever happened to you? You find an interesting recipe or craft project on Pinterest that you want to check out only to click through and find the blog post is missing one or more essential elements required for you to actually be able to bake the goody or make the craft yourself. Or maybe everything is there, but it’s so disorganized, you immediately give up figuring it out and move on. You return to Pinterest without repinning the post. And that blogger just lost an excellent opportunity to see her blog post “go viral.”
If you’re like me, it probably only takes you a few seconds to look over a blog post and decide if you want to repin it. A few minutes ago, I found a blog post on making a “relax bottle” (aka “mind jar“) for counting down a child’s timeout minutes. I love the idea, the pictures are great… but I got to the blog post and couldn’t immediately figure out if the bottles are made using supplies I might already have on hand. And, where are the instructions? There are tons of great pictures, but the how-to part is all over the place. I still wanted to do this project, but I had to go look elsewhere for better instructions. Continue reading “4 Tips for writing a “Pinworthy” DIY blog post”
As a high school student, I always hated it when my literature teachers insisted that we identify the themes and motifs of the stories we read. However, as an adult, I have found that my life is laced with a few distinct recurring themes and motifs.
For today’s Wednesday Writing Prompt, I invite you to take a look at your own life and consider what themes and motifs seem to appear most frequently. Then choose one of these themes (and/or motifs) and write an essay, short story, or poem that explores the impact of this theme on your life.
You might also consider how the themes and motifs from your everyday life influence your writing in general. For example, do you often find yourself incorporating these same themes into each piece? Continue reading “Themes and motifs in everyday life”
Earlier this semester, I wrote a blog post about the new blogs that my Communication Technologies students were creating. Well, they’ve been hard at work blogging all semester, and now they are looking for some feedback on their blogs. Each student has created an online survey asking for feedback on their individual blogs, and we are looking for willing respondents to take a look at one or more of the blogs and then take the survey. Continue reading “Can you do me a huge favor?”
Yesterday I promised that I was going to begin to share a writing prompt on Wednesdays here on my blog. So, without further ado, here is today’s prompt:
Do you consider yourself a “real” writer? Why or why not? What makes a writer?
For today, I chose a topic that will likely make a better essay or blog post than a short story. However, I think it’s a topic we should all be considering if we take our writing seriously. Continue reading “Wednesday Writing Prompt: Are you a real writer?”
Earlier this week, my 12-year-old came home from school with a booklet of poems he’d written for his English class. They’d read the book, Far North, by Will Hobbs, and had to write several poems about the book in a variety of forms.
I was more than just a little impressed with some of the poems my son had written, so I asked him if I could share one on my blog for Poetry Friday, which is sponsored this week by Random Noodling. This is the poem he chose for me to share:
Could you see that plane fly by
Like a bird
In the sky
Now the plane is going down
The bush pilot Clint was never found
~By Corbin DesJardins
And I wanted to share one more. This place poem was one of my favorites in Corbin’s collection: Continue reading “Corbin’s poems about Far North”
Write on the World 