The IPA vowel chart looks weird and abstract. What is this quadrilateral? How the heck do you read this mess? Am I supposed to be able to tell how to say each vowel from its position in the chart? Fortunately, yes, the position does tell you something. It tells you
Lately I've been reading a lot of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction. A week or two ago I finished Too Like the Lightning. Now I'm reading A Canticle for Leibowitz, listening to Wizard and Glass from The Dark Tower, and edging toward reading Ward. And I ordered
Contrary to what I might have thought, I did write an outline once, and it seems pretty good, but I wrote a different story because it was too detailed to review nicely. I had a clear statement of theme, notes relating the characters to the theme, a four-scene outline with
I write fiction a sentence at a time, one each day. That's my routine minimum. On a good day, I write an entire paragraph or three. I'm pretty happy with how the prose comes out this way, but less happy with the story. There's
There's a quote that goes something like "good artists borrow, great artists steal." A quote investigator post looked into this and found a similar quote in a T.S. Elliot essay from "The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism." One of the surest