Katharine's Writer's Block

As a kid, I dabbled in writing Scooby-Doo fanfiction--before fanfiction blew up in popularity, might I add. As a teenager, I dabbled in writing skits that were performed by my church’s puppet team to an audience in the children’s program. Like the Scooby-Doo stories though, those skits may be lost to time as well, but the experience was still pretty awesome! Skits, a synonym of sketches, are typically just small-scale or abbreviated acting projects. The most defining charact

In October 2025, I took a cross-country road trip with my husband. A few days in, we parked overnight at a truck stop that had some cool postcards. I grabbed a handful to share as souvenirs for some kids back home and made a point from then on to check out any postcard inventory at most other stops we made. Little did I know that our road trip started just a few days after a recently implemented holiday that celebrates the souvenir of choice. If unfamiliar, postcards are spe

An idea of discussing classic literature has been on the blogging to-do list for a while and some buzz on X surrounding “The Odyssey” film last month gave me a good jumping-off point for it. In my high school English classes in the late 2000’s, I read Homer’s poems--“Iliad” and “Odessey”-- “Beowulf”, “Canterbury Tales”, To Kill a Mockingbird, and probably a few other renowned titles. In college during the early 2010’s, my studies acquainted me with Jane Austen, Frankenstein,

I’ve decided to honor the fourth anniversary of my marriage with some poetry! I know the what of it was discussed at length a few years ago. So this post is going to follow up with the how to do it. And as I walk through the process, I’ll create a piece to share with my husband! Let’s get into how to write poetry! Some foundational or refresher ideas A professor writing for the Poetry Foundation explains most poetry contains these elements: an arrangement of language that c

This post is publishing on the cusp of back-to-school season in the U.S.! If furthering your education or developing your skills in the act and art of writing is in your interest, this post will share some possibilities to consider. Some crucial forethoughts to start though: There’s a little more discussion about education misconceptions in the Myths About Writing post, but the sum of it is that educational/development opportunities are good stops on a journey in writing. Eve

One of my Christmas presents in 2024 was a Tome Writing Toolkit, a computer-based and user-customized resource that guides and encourages aspiring writers through the process of novel writing. Three different toolkit options are offered, each with varying levels of feature access, but each offering starts with a quiz that helps tailor the toolkit to meet the user where they are in their writing journey. This may just be me, but just from the first few days with my tooklit, I

NANOWRIMO 2024 created waves last month by attempting to voice a neutral stance on the use of writing with artificial intelligence (AI). NaNoWriMo neither explicitly supports nor condemns any approach to writing, including the use of tools that leverage AI. We recognize that harm has been done to the writing and creative communities at the hands of bad actors in the generative AI space, and that the ethical questions and risks posed by some aspects of this technology are rea

I can’t come up with any cooking analogies for this topic this time; home construction lent itself better to the discussion. Most...

Poetry is a blend of art and written or spoken word. It’s often evocative; centered on strong images, memories, or feelings. In the Netflix series Bridgerton, Benedict Bridgerton eloquently describes it as: "The art of revealing precious truth with words..." More still, poetry is a form that has stood the test of time. Connected to oral tradition, history, stories, and information were preserved with poetry before literacy was refined. Some of the earliest poems known in his