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Book News! "Excavating Lost Languages" in Frozen Wavelets #8! (and more…) "The Life Cycle of a Shadow" in The Compendium of Enigmatic Species! There You Are, Creativity CreateNet, Skynet’s Awkard Cousin, is Upon Us

Football, National Identity, and Where We Call Home

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Every four years, when the world cup comes around, I find myself thinking more about national identity. It’s one of the few times I feel myself connected closely to my German-ness, brings lots of opportunities to talk with people of other nationalities about a shared passion, and shows interesting patterns for how differently people can […]

Appreciating Film/TV Adaptations

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I love teaching Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express because many students enjoy the departure from texts they’re used to studying and they really get into the mystery genre. Many will have already seen the 2017 Kenneth Branagh film adaptation and ask whether we’ll be watching that in class. I tell them I’ve got […]

Ask A #Writer: Is It Worth It To Be One?

Ask a Writer Asked and answered on Quora. The Original Question: Is it worth to be an author? It’s the best thing ever, but not for the reasons you think. 1) Your time is your own. You can wake up when you want to, sleep when it suits you, and you don’t let a clock […]

A Tricky (But Important) Lesson

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I decided to take a risk in one of my classes a few weeks ago. I’ve taught Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 for many years to my Honors 10 English students and it generally gets a good response. Students appreciate the storytelling, note the patterns with other dystopian stories they’re familiar with, and generally connect quite […]

The craft of #writing: ratcheting chapter tension

Like a pinball, your story bounces around in your head, hitting your occipital lobe, hippocampus, and the front of your brain, lighting them all up with the act of creation. If you are a master writer, you light up the caudate nucleus, which handles skills gained over time. Creating a story uses tons of brain […]