Up Right Down # 1

Up Right Down already features over a dozen versions of the same story. What’s yours? (Via) THE PLOT: In a bistro in Paris a young woman (A) tells her three girlfriends (B, C, and D) about the affair she had with an American tourist, who returned home promising to write, and hasn’t. It’s been over…

Paths to Publication

A great series hosted by Heidi Ruby Miller, a recent graduate of Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction program. She has asked writers of genre fiction (fantasy, crime, etc.) to tell the story of their first publication. I’m just starting a career track unit in Introduction to Literary Study, and several of the students want to…

Emergent Puzzle Solutions

Interactive fiction author Emily Short offers a thoughtful analysis of the function of designing puzzles that permit the player to come up with original solutions. She refers to her game Metamorphoses, which includes a complex physical world model that includes such concepts as size, shape, weight, etc.  For instance, you can beat down a door…

St. Valentine's Day Gifts

From the University of Toronto’s Representative Poetry Online: “Poems to be memorized and spoken to your sweetheart.” They came to tell your faults to me, They named them over one by one; I laughed aloud when they were done, I knew them all so well before, — Oh, they were blind, too blind to see…

The Science of Fairy Tales

A somewhat silly, but still amusing piece from Live Science: Given that blondes generally have about 140,000 hairs on their heads, her hair should easily support the weight of many, many princes. However, there is more to this story. If Rapunzel simply let down her hair and the prince started climbing immediately, her hair would…

Pointless Showing and Good Telling

My students are working on showing and telling. It’s a difficult concept to learn, and I’ve found over the years it’s not that easy to teach. So as part of an upcoming short story assignment, I’ve started to introduce the concept of “pointless showing” to define the practice of avoiding clear language in the misguided…

Most Kindergartners Now Can Read a Book

Good literacy news from the Washington Post: The share of kindergarten students in the county who can read simple books has risen from 39 to 93 percent in six years, according to school system data culled from reading assessments given each spring. Achievement is so high, and across so many demographic groups, that school officials…

Microsoft Offers $44.6B for Yahoo

Yahoo (AP): “Microsoft’s consistent belief has been that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! clearly represents the best way to deliver maximum value to our respective shareholders, as well as create a more efficient and competitive company that would provide greater value and service to our customers,” Ballmer wrote. It has been years since I’ve…