The Write Place
Here you will find everything to do with writing, whether it is my writing or what I'm learning from reading books on writing. Reading, vocabulary, and grammar are the tools of the trade. The very best people to learn from are the ones who are seasoned writers who teach writing. You would be wise to enlist them as your mentors, as I have.
- In: The Write Place
I'm currently working on a new collection of literary short stories. The characters are based on people I knew in my past. I came from a lower middle class family with a father who was a postal worker and my mother was a housewife who worked at a variety of blue collar jobs, as they used to be called. Basically that means no formal education is needed. This is where I came from and these are the kinds of people I met and worked with in several of my early jobs. And now, looking back on those days, these are the people whose lives are the most interesting to me if only because they lacked the knowledge and experience to carve out for themselves a more meaningful and prosperous life.
- In: The Write Place
May Sarton’s childhood was rich and intellectually stimulating with a father who was an international scholar and a mother who was an artist. Both parents were avid readers and exposed their daughter to an abundant cultural life. Although Sarton was supposed to go to Vassar, the theater became her passion. But the depression soon ended that and with a $100 a month allowance from her father she sold poems and later short stories to popular magazines. Her editor at Houghton Mifflin told her he felt she was a novelist rather than a short story writer. Thus began her career as a novelist. But poetry was at the core of Sarton’s creativity.
- In: The Write Place
I will always check out a man with washboard abs and an excellent physique. What normal healthy woman wouldn't? But I can't tell you how sick I am of all the book covers that have half-clothed men (revealing washboard abs) and often with equally clad women draped over them. This is the ultimate in boring and unoriginal and I can't get by these covers fast enough. Since I've joined BookGorilla and BookBub and a few others, I've been inundated by these cookie-cutter covers. I can only imagine that the contents of the book is most likely as canned as the cover.
1 comments- In: The Write Place
Another thorn in my side is when people refer to other people as 'that'. I can't believe how many times I hear someone talking about a person or group of people as 'that'. So here is the simple rule:
"Who" refers to people.
"That" refers to things.
Examples: "The lady that put the pie in the window was enticing me to steal it."
or -
"There were so many people that didn't know how to ride a bike."
- In: The Write Place
Ok, here it is, once and for all, the proper use of 'it's'.
If the sentence you are writing could be read 'it is' , then it is 'it's'. If you can't read it as 'it is', then it is 'its'.
For example:
"It's a beautiful day today!" You can also say, "It is a beautiful day today".
But you would not say, "Its a beautiful day today."
Believe it or not 'Its" is the possessive. Example: "The airplane won't lose its way in the dark."
If you use an apostrophe there, 'it's' you would basically be saying, "The airplane won't lose it is way in the dark."