Announcement: The Writers' Ramble

I have an exciting announcement! My critique group has finally made our group blog live. It is called The Writers' Ramble. Go check it out.

You can read the description for yourself, but basically we will write a blog post on the same topic each month, then The Writers' Ramble gives a brief synopsis of each post with a link.

So you can now check out all the wicked awesome people who are willing to put up with my crap and help me polish into gold...or at least bronze.

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The Perfect Ending to a Perfect Story (Hopefully)

We've invested a lot of time and energy into writing the perfect story, only to be faced with creating the perfect ending. We want our conflict wrapped up with a nice, neat bow, but we don't want to cheat our readers. My prime example of this faux pas is the Hunger Games series. I loved about 2 1/2 books of this series, and was furious at the last half of the 3rd book. Suzanne Collins broke every promise she had made to her reader, and she broke many of the beginning rules of writing. I'll try not to spoil the story for those of you who haven't read it yet, and if you haven't read the series, you should...at least as a case study. But basically, Collins wrote her character into a corner (which is good practice, by the way), and then gave up trying to find a logical, believable way to get that character out of the corner (which is NOT a good practice). Plus her main character did not actively solve the conflict driving the entire series, and the difficulties in th...

K12 Teaching in 2020

Today I drove home from work with my rock music blasting at higher decibels than, I'm sure, was healthy. But I needed a heavy beat loud enough to feel it vibrate in my chest. I'm not a drinker, but if I were, today would be a three-glasses-of-wine day. And there's no specific reason. Except that I'm only a month into the school year, and I'm already exhausted. And I'm not alone. All you parents out there who are concerned about the style, quality, amount or any other qualifier of education your child is receiving this year, I can guarantee you that an entire team of teachers, administrators, and support staff is just as worried. We're doing our damnedest to meet your (and our!) expectations. Right now, I'm barely keeping my head above the water line. I am the kind of personality who plans things out. I visualize my dive into the deep end, consider all possible complications, and then perform a smooth breaststroke from one side to the next before any of t...

Top Eight Things I Love About Writing

http://www.123rf.com/ Why do writers write? It's certainly not for the money. The major success stories are all we hear about, but they are actually so rare as to be laughable. So why do writers write? I think the answers are individual for each writer, but similar across many writers. In honor of Valentine's Day, here are the top eight (8) reasons why I write: 1. The creative process. I love when I have a new idea in my head and I get excited about it. I love to express those stories and put them on the paper for someone else to enjoy. The mental process of figuring out how to make a story work is fascinating and exciting. 2. The escape. When I write, I get to create the world and events. It allows me to be in control of how good (or bad) things are. It rejuvenates me to face my own reality again. Writing is one of my outlets of stress relief; I can always make thin...

The Write Slice: Write or Wrong

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