stack of books with titles referencing jokes in the piece

Hang around enough writers groups and creative writing classes, and you’ll come across history’s most emetic sandwich: the compliment sandwich. That overly prescriptive, insincere way of giving feedback in a praise-criticism-praise formula that leaked out of the corporate jargon vanity management book world and into the real world where it could

Read More
I too am disorder, cappuccino machine

Writing routines can really be quite a double-edged sword. There’s the obvious good side: developing good habits (the *doing* the writing part being, of course, the most important), and using memory cues to help you jump back into your story efficiently. (On that note, just look at the old psychological studies

Read More
a battledroid holds a pen while a cute cat pen bag wears a vintage robot necklace

With ChatGPT all over the news, everyone who loves juvenile humor is an honorary francophone. It turns out that, spoken aloud, “ChatGPT” sounds like “Chat j’ai pété,” which translates to “Cat, I farted.” This will likely be the greatest contribution that ChatGPT will make to society. I see all sorts of

Read More

If I had a penny every time someone pitched an idea at me to ask if I thought it had legs, I’d still not have enough to buy a soda (curse you, inflation!), but I’d still have a big mess of pennies to fit up and cram into a coin purse.

Read More

The first time I encountered the “Two Kinds of Writers” trope was in college, when a creative writing class I was in decided to bond, literarily speaking , by mutually  looking down on those talentless, soulless hacks who use such a gauche thing as an *outline* to write their formulaic dreck.

Read More