Category — Inspiration

I should say what I actually found while on the Poetry Foundation’s web site. (See previous post.)

Go read “I’m Glad I’m Me” by Phil Bolsta. It’s from Kids Pick the Funniest Poems. It completely made my day!

I’ve felt pretty stuck the last few days. It’s been a big week of transitions with my wife’s work, our son’s preschool and therapies, and several changes in our normal routine. It’s disorienting, and all this and my normal work schedule has left me feeling low on creative energy.

We’re programmed to react to these perceived shortfalls in accomplishments in a given week by working harder to catch up. I clued in enough today to try something a little different. I took a few minutes and browsed through my writing-oriented bookmarks in my browser to see if I could find something to wake up my creative spirit.

The Poetry Foundation’s web site is the Grand Central Station of poetry. Poetry helps me relax and regroup. I love the immediacy of it. I love discovering new poets. I love reading something that makes me say “Yes!” I love reading poetry from writers who speak their own unfiltered truth.

The Poetry Foundation is to me about discovery. The ‘Poetry Tool’ (approximately the middle of the page) lets you look for poems for specific reasons or for no reason at all. It’s a perfect way to re-center yourself after a rough week.

Don’t forget to check out their wealth of articles, audio resources, and podcasts. Just remember to come up for air and do some writing of your own, too!

March 4th is National Grammar Day! It’s so great that it even has its own web site. Not surprisingly, it’s NationalGrammarDay.com. I just discovered this site and haven’t had a chance to look at it much, but it’s chock-full of grammar goodness and Internet resources. Go check it out.

It wouldn’t be National Grammar Day without a little wisdom from Grammar Girl. Go read her Top Ten Grammar Myths transcript in honor of this day.

Shameless self-promotion – you can also read my Guide to Improving Your Writing and Grammar on my main site!

Celebrate with Grammatical Turkey Chili or a Grammartini! Just don’t take a red pen to the grocery store and edit their signs. You may get arrested.

Theodor Seuss Geisel – better known to the world as Dr. Seuss – was born March 2, 1904. To say that Geisel has had a powerful influence on generations of children – many of us now adults – is a vast understatement.

For me, and I imagine for many parents, it’s wonderful to be able to read to my son the same Dr. Seuss books I loved as a child. He loves them so much that I have a handful of them memorized so I can tell him those stories when we don’t have the books with us. Having his lyric words in my head whenever I need them has been a gift to me, too. I catch myself reciting them even without my son around and feel better for it.

Of my 34 years on this earth, I’ve spent about 21 of them in school of some sort. My favorite teacher was my high school English instructor, Dr. Jon Miller. At our Christmas semi-formal dances he read the Grinch. I first heard him read it 18 years ago, and I still remember it like it was yesterday. Imagine all these high school kids in ties, slacks, and dresses sitting around in a big circle for storytime.

He does a reading of the Grinch for the alumni every holiday, and we’ve taken our son the past two years to hear him. That’s been real gift to us. I hope when he retires, probably sometime in the next few years, that he realizes what a profound effect he’s had on now two generations of people.

If you’ve read out the Dr. Seuss collection at your library or bookstore and are looking for some books from another author to try out, your first stop should be Sandra Boynton. Her books are absolutely brilliant. Don’t just take my word for it. My son is serious about having Dr. Seuss and Sandra Boynton books with us everywhere we go. That should tell you something right there. His favorite right now is Barnyard Dance. If you have kids, run don’t walk and go get some of her books.

I was throwing around in my head the idea of a short story about people who were born on days or at times that are in some way rare.

The ‘Leap Day Conundrum’ – for lack of a better term – is something people born on February 29th deal with. It’s not that big of a deal really in a practical sense. Depending on where in the world you live, your legal birthday is either the 28th or March 1st on the other years. I doubt people born on Leap Day think much about it except when people act like they had a revelation and ask if you realized you were a Leap Baby. I guess it would put a damper on things when you turned 21 if the bartender decided to turn you down on the 28th.

Perhaps you could develop an interesting story around several people together who were born at unusual times: Leap Day, twins born across the daylight savings time ‘fall back’ hour, or the first baby born in 2000 being the more obvious ones. You could pick some that are less obvious: born on the first day of Hanukkah when it falls in November, on Easter when it falls on the spring equinox, or when Passover and Easter fall on the same day, to bring about some good religious themes. You could also work in people born on infamous days in history: September 11, the invasion of Pearl Harbor, and so on.

Since it only comes every four years (though not always, as you’ll see), let’s go over some fun calendar facts, just because we can.

• Leap years occur every four years except when the year is evenly divisible by 100 (e.g., 1700, 1800, 1900). However, there’s an exception to that rule, too. If the year is divisible by 400, the rule of 100s doesn’t apply. As a result, 2000 was a leap year.
• It is possible to go eight years between leap years. The last time this occurred was between 1896 and 1904. It will occur again between 2096 and 2104.
• Why do we have leap years in the first place? The actual solar year (how long it takes the Earth to go around the sun) is approximately 365 1/4 days, meaning that we get a quarter of a day behind every year. So, leap years help us catch up.
• Why do we skip leap year every 100 years but add it back in every 400? The keyword above is approximately a quarter of a day behind each year. Currently, the solar year is about 11 minutes short of 365 1/4 days. This means we have to throw in another fudge factor every 100 years by taking out a leap year and every 400 years by adding it back in.
• Even all that fudging doesn’t completely solve the problem. There’s enough error left to compound over a long period of time that it’s estimated that in the year 4909 we’ll be a full day off even with all the leap years between now and then. People way too concerned about this are asking for the year 4000 to be designated as a leap year even though it’s divisible by 400. A logical, wait-and-see approach may be merited, both because the solar year will ever so slightly change over time as the orbital speed of the earth slows and the years get a smidge longer and, well, because no one alive right now should really care enough to act on it.

Why do I know all this? Beats me. Sometimes random knowledge interests you at some point and then sticks in your brain.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, they made a movie out of Groundhog Day, and other movies since have been based on the idea. Could be fertile ground here for something!

If you write a novel set at some turn of a century, you can thank me later for helping you know whether that year was a leap year.

I also think it was part of the solution of an Encyclopedia Brown story I read once.

Again, here’s another marginally writing-oriented post. Writers do need to exercise their brains a little outside the written word on occasion. Besides, we’re kindred spirits with visual artists.

The “Big Spanish Castle” illusion will cause you to have a “yeah, right” moment when you read the instructions. Just do it. You won’t believe it otherwise. It freaked me out the first time I did it.

The theory behind this is based on the concept of afterimage. You can find a neat experiment and explanation of this here.

The guy who created the castle illusion also includes a helpful tutorial on how to make your own from any image (look below the image on his page).

What I found interesting about both of these was that after going through the experiments once and then going back and doing them again later, I could sense a moment when what I was staring at started to look ‘different’, which seemed to coincide with the moment my retinas got ‘tired’ (see the afterimage link above). I didn’t have to wait the full 30 seconds, just until I sensed whatever it was that was different.

If nothing else, it’s a fun diversion. So enjoy, then get back to writing!

This isn’t explicitly about writing, but I think this is a fascinating site. Obsolete Skills is compiling a wiki-style, master list of skills that used to be important in our society but no longer are.

A ’skill’ can be actual job skills (programming in BASIC), everyday actions people no longer perform (dialing a rotary phone), or skills that just aren’t useful anymore (like doing hexadecimal conversions in your head – which was questionably useful to begin with). Sadly, at one point I did all three of these. One caveat – some things in the list really are still used and remain useful – like understanding the Dewey Decimal System – so clearly this is a work in progress.

If you need a bit of writing inspiration, go there, pick a random ‘obsolete skill’, and write about a character who has that skill. Great cure for writer’s block!

While just getting something published – even in a non-paying market – can be fun and rewarding, neither you nor I are going to turn down some cold, hard cash for our writing.

While something like Writer’s Market is an invaluable resource for breaking into paying markets, it’s also intimidating. There are plenty of smaller, friendlier-feeling, new-writer-welcoming markets out there far too numerous to make it into Writer’s Market. Keeping up with these opportunities requires a personal touch and a passion for helping all writers succeed.

That’s where C. Hope Clark’s FundsforWriters.com comes in. Every two weeks, Hope sends out a newsletter that lists grant opportunities and well-paying markets and contests only. At a ridiculously cheap $12/year, you can’t beat it.

I heard her in an interview a while back and love her spirit and commitment to her work and to writers everywhere. She has a ton of material on her site, so go have a look.

I recently discovered the FreelanceSwitch blog, and it easily made it onto my daily reading list. Their purpose is to offer advice, share their wisdom, and create a community atmosphere for freelancers everywhere. It’s a place where freelancers can work together to overcome the challenges of freelancing and find ways to improve their chances of success.

Definitely check out their recent article “How Much is Your Time Worth?”, the ever-present issue that freelancers everywhere wrestle with.

I’ve only explored a fraction of their extensive site so far. Go now and check it out!

Connie, Maybe easily is one of the best short stories I’ve heard in a long time. It was featured eons ago on Escape Pod, which is currently one of my favorite podcasts for short stories.

Connie, Maybe by Paul Martens is a story about a man from a rural town claiming to have been kidnapped by aliens, though no one in town believes him. The fear of an alien conspiracy rises as people in town start becoming ‘different’. But which is easier to accept as the reason for these changes – aliens, or that even in small towns people can change just because they want to?

Wichita Rutherford reads the story and gives a beyond-brilliant performance. You have to hear it to believe it. I heard he does an occasional podcast of his own. That’s worth looking up!