Joe Cecil

Challenging vs. threatening?

(Mad libs on a distinction I got from somewhere else. Maybe here though I can't find it when I search for both terms together. I'm interested in whether this is accurate to the original definition, but I can't find that original to compare against.

Sounds I don't need to know, but want to

I don't have a particular need to recognize or be able to produce these sounds, but I kind of want to anyway. IPA symbol (per Wikipedia) Sound name y Close front rounded vowel ø Close-mid front rounded vowel œ Open-mid front rounded vowel ʊ Near-close near-back rounded vowel

My piece-by-piece scenes rarely work, but that's okay, and planning might help

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

Bouncing off books

Sometimes I bounce off of books without ever properly disliking them, including books I expect to like. I've had this happen a few times now with very different stories. It happened with Too Like the Lightning on my first read. It has happened twice with The Count of

Overly detailed summaries are worse than none

(Or at least, they are worse when you don't recognize most of the information being summarized.) In a course I'm taking, I saw a graphic today that's supposed to summarize a nonlinear process and found myself anxious. There are five blocks and each block

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