Fallen for Sign

I spent the past weekend attending a crash course in American Sign Language (ASL). Dustin and I have been learning and using ASL for about a year now, and while our vocabulary has gotten to be pretty good, we know we’ve been missing the Bigger Picture. We just didn’t know quite how big that was [...]

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Fiction Writing Pitfalls

Before I go too far, let me put up a disclaimer about my credentials. I am not a published fiction writer. I have had several non-fiction stories published in fairly obscure journals, but no one has ever paid me to write fiction. I hope that changes some day, but for now I do it for [...]

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The Narrator In My Head

Since the age of 13 or so, I have thought in narrative. Most people have some sort of inner monologue. Mine just thinks it is narrating a book. It started out as a rather self-conscious habit, a thing I started doing as I began to write my first (reeeeally terrible) novel. It was a kind [...]

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Sex & Gender in the Coe College Writing Center

Shawn, you made my day by asking. You can be my favorite this week. Ask, and you shall receive. This is the edited version. I can’t find the version where I tried to determine how many people in the WC were just talking about sex, versus how many were actually having sex. I [...]

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The Writing Mirror

In writing class today, we played the composite story game. Most people have done this at some point in their lives. Each person in a group starts a story, then every few minutes, you pass it around and then write a few sentences on someone else’s story. Eventually your story comes back to you, having [...]

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SO not enthused.

There are certain words I don’t believe belong in the english language. “Enthused” is one of them.
I can’t remember the first time I heard this word, but I’m pretty sure I even cringed at the time. Maybe it’s a fad word, like “stoked” (a word with the same definition, but infinitely more satisfying in mental [...]

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Bazillion

I just used the word “bazillion” in a post, and noticed the spell checker didn’t object. So naturally, I decided to Wiki it. Here’s the good part:
“Imaginary words ending in the sound “-illion”, such as zillion[1] and bazillion[2], are often used as fictitious names for an unspecified, large number, by analogy to names of large [...]

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Woe! for the Lost G

I spend a lot of time thinking about words and the way people use them. I’ve had the privilege of traveling to a number of different countries, and many of the States. It fascinates me to listen to the way people talk in each different place. From State to State, you might expect that the [...]

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Epic Belgian Email #32

(Note: My mommy taught me that if you can’t say something nice,
you shouldn’t say anything at all. As a result, this Epic will
contain no mentions of my thesis promoter, beyond this note.
Interpret that as you will. :p)
And the word of the day is: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
After a rather frustrating week of waiting around, I have gotten
my thesis [...]

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