Category: Writing
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Strange Appositives
It is passing strange that in my time as a blogger, I find myself writing about appositives twice. I mean: Really? How many people even know what an appositive is? And why do I end up writing about them twice? But before I answer those questions, I absolutely must address my deliberate use of the…
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My Writing Life: 12
In My Writing Life: 10 I said that I started a blog in 2014 and promised that I would write about it later. And so here I am, concluding this series on my writing life by talking about my blog, “Much to Write About,” on WordPress. I started this blog because writer-illustrator-designer friend Robin Koontz…
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My Writing Life: 10
The 2010s were a new and very different time for me as a writer, in three important ways. First, I dipped my toes into the world of self-publishing . . . and then I jumped into the enterprise head-first. Because I’ve blogged about most of my self-published books before, I won’t dwell on them. But…
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The F Words: Anglo-Saxon Origins
When I see high school students raising protest signs and chanting in support of their teachers, as in the strike (earlier this year) by the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, I’m heartened. And when I see that the student chants are poetic in form (We ain’t shy./We ain’t timid./We are angry./We are livid.) I’m more than…
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My Writing Life: 9
When the new century arrived, I was busy working on children’s books, both fiction and workbooks. The fiction consisted of two early readers, Waltur Buys a Pig in a Poke (Houghton, 2005) and Waltur Paints Himself into a Corner (Houghton, 2006). Early readers, as I’ve written about before in “Early Readers: A Short Phase,” are…
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My Writing Life: 8
In my previous blog I mentioned that researching Women at Play was an intense, four-year affair, and that it forever colored my attitude toward writing nonfiction. The nonfiction subjects I chose after Women at Play were individuals: Jack Graney on the one hand, Earl Derr Biggers on the other. Everything about Women at Play was…
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The F Words: October Rules
In September of 2022 The F Words moved from a frontlist book to a backlist book. A publisher’s backlist consists of all the books it still carries that were published a year ago, or longer. Some books a publisher carries go out of print. Others stay in print forever, bringing in revenues to the publisher…