Katharine's Writer's Block

My anniversary inspiration this year took me in a nostalgic direction! My husband and I met through the Bumble dating app in the summer of 2020. He was passing through my area while on a truck-driving job so we ended up on each other’s feeds. We swiped right, made plans to meet up, and the rest is history of course! One thing I remember about his profile is that his bio claimed something to the effect of his photos not doing justice to his blue eyes. They certainly didn’t; ho

Illustration from "Schoolhouse Rock" segment on verbs. Video clip in sources. The insights into living life are a dime a dozen: “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” -Winston Churchill “There is no passion to be found by playing small--in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” -Nelson Mandela “Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.” -Emily Dickenson “The key to immortality is first livi

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

It seems like every day can be a holiday and every month is one for some kind of recognition, remembrance, or awareness. Many are established by various organizations or special interests, so keeping up can be hard if you’re not affiliated or in-the-know in some way.  Similar organizations and interests of literary culture have managed to get their values recognized with their own various holidays and months. This Lessons & Advice post gives a rundown on several special times

Happy New Year! At the start or end of a year, we often like to take stock of our goals, accomplishments, or other accruements during our previous trek around the sun. For me, my cat has no obvious fleas after I've diligently groomed and treated him throughout the year! I lost--and kept off--around fifteen pounds on a weight loss program I started in 2023! In March 2025, my Lessons & Advice blog will be two years old. This post will be the fifty-sixth to run as of this publi

I recently learned the old show, Mythbusters , is one of my husband’s favorites. He was home more often over the summer for reasons I’ll keep private and discovered it's available on Amazon Prime. So streaming his old favorite show was one of the ways he liked to pass time and how we’d spend some nights together. For those unfamiliar, Mythbusters was a science-oriented program that ran on the Discovery Channel from 2003 to 2016. In each episode, hosts Adam Savage, Jamie Hynem

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

The act of handwriting-- cursive  or otherwise--seems like a dying art that’s fallen to the omnipresence of computer technology. Which is a shame considering how penscript is still prevalent and offers good benefits. However, keyboarding, touch typing, or simply typing, is nothing more than the act and skill of writing with a computer and is not without its own merits: Typing can be efficient.  Pushing buttons that correlate with letters or characters takes less time than scr

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

A previous lesson touched on the controversies of banned and challenged books. These measures aim to limit, if not remove, material from...