The other day I was looking at my website analytics and noticed an interesting data point. There was a huge spike in the number of hits on June 22nd–over a hundred people visited my website.
I can’t believe this is happening. Can you?
Sometime in January, the universe sneezed, our space-time continuum shifted, and our metaverse got switched with another. Somehow we got stuck in someone else’s pandemic novel. Or this is proof we’re all living a simulation, like Neo, and somebody with a warped sense of humor introduced a new glitch in the Matrix. I guess it depends on whether you like getting your stories from books or movies. I’m a writer. I like books. I also like cool sci-fi movies. Don’t make me choose favorites.
Last week I saw a viral post going around on Twitter. Of course, I read it–and found nothing in the letter to support her accusation. What I read was a heart-felt letter of support from a devout Christian to his Hobby Lobby employees.
Earlier this year in May, I ran across a homework assignment in my son’s state-mandated, eighth grade sex-ed curriculum that infuriated me.
A few interesting things have happened in the past few months since I published my last blog post: 1. Obnoxious emails that appear to be sent from my own email address, the one I use to query literary agents, began filling up my spam folder.
I did a DuckDuckGo search for the words “when is a final draft finished novel” (I try to avoid Google) and found, at the top of the search results, a class offered by the Iowa Summer Writing Festival titled The Final Draft: On Finishing and Knowing When You’ve Finished Your Novel. In other words, the answer to this innocuous question is valuable enough to be turned into a commodity that can be exchanged in the free market for money, like pork bellies.
As a parent of two children, I read Ms. Szalai’s review of Senator Ben Sasse’s book The Vanishing American Adult because I want to raise my kids to become responsible, self-reliant adults. I did not expect a condescending, political diatribe.
In the September Pub Rants blog post from Nelson Literary Agency, “9 Story Openings to Avoid, Part 4,” they posed a fun challenge to craft a brief opening scene from these six lines of dialogue…
As I approached the back wall of the house, I held my right hand before me and sliced down, slicing through the air with my hand, then walked through the wall instead of colliding into it. But instead of walking through and ending up on the other side of the wall, I found myself in a black void where nothing existed, as if I literally walked outside the parameters of the dream…