We had a Voices of Darfur thing tonight at my college and it really helped get a lot of people involved in the happenings of the genocide.
To date in Darfur, an estimated 400,000 people have been killed, 2.5 Million have been relocated to IDP Camps (Internally Displaced Persons) in Sudan and refugee camps in Chad in [...]

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But the truth is, if you want to have some creativity brewing you need to be Ambidextious.  Take this article by Michael Vaughn:
In the 1970s, neuroscientist Roger Sperry conducted studies on epileptics who had undergone split-brain operations—a severing of the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the cerebral [...]

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Confused when it comes to using the semicolon? This site offers an explanation of when to use it. It is acceptable in two instances: the more common “when connecting two sentences” and also the supercomma!
Somehow I don’t think that gets anyone very excited…except for maybe grammarians.

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I was looking through a list of banned books today and…I guess it just kind of surprised me.  Many of these books are those we are taught to learn as classics nowadays, and some are ones that are ‘bad’ but…still should not be banned (at least, in my opinion…banning is bad no matter what the [...]

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Now! 8pm EST on ABC!!  Woo! …did you know this was once booed upon and set the tv networks into a frenzy because it was obviously focused on the Christian religion and did not include canned laughter? 

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What’s your favorite animated Disney movie?  My friends and I are going to have a Disney ‘classics’ marathon here before too long (yes, we’re 20 and we still watch Disney movies…we understand our lameness).  What do you consider to be the ‘classics’? 
Personally, my favorite is the Lion King!  Hakuna Matata!

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…on the Writer’s Strike?
 Check out Chad Gervich’s Scriptwriting Blog for all the information! 
Apparently the writers are going back to the negotiating table tomorrow.

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As writers, we all love to read good books for inspiration. What book inspired you as a writer and why?

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“All you need is love.   But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.”
 -Charles M. Shulz (1922-2000)

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No really, go elf yourself. 
 This site allows you to put your face on an elf and ‘you’ dance around to a song and apparently you can call in and record your voice for free to go along with your elf!
 Also try Scrooge Yourself.
 It’s a lot of fun.

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Anyone going shopping Friday? 
For what? 
Camping out? 
Leaving at 4 am? 
It’s the biggest shopping day of the year! 

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I hate this phrase. I hate this phrase a lot. Which got me thinking about where it came from in the first place, and it’s actually a debate unto its self…
“A Whole Nother”
An other -> A nother
Is it possible that the phrase was created simply because of a moved letter? This would mean, though, that [...]

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The Shakespeare Insult Kit
Here’s a few:

froward base-court baggage!
unmuzzled fen-sucked pigeon-egg!
dankish pox-marked apple-john!

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Ever feel the urge to just take a book from the library and keep it for yourself? Evidently, so did these people. Bibliokleptomania isn’t as uncommon as you might think.
“I’m afraid my burning passion overrode my conscience. It may appear selfish, but I felt the books had been abandoned. They were covered with dust [...]

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The grammarians over at Purdue University have collaborated a free source of grammar and usage articles over at the OWL (Online Writing Lab). I’ve had English professors from my own university suggest it. If you’re writing a paper, the OWL is always a good source for figuring out formatting, how to avoid plagiarism, outlining, grammar [...]

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The YWS Quiz Show in the chat room over the week proved to be a close battle. But the monkeys overcame the dragons with a final score of 41 to 34.
 Congrats monkeys!

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This is something I struggle with quite a lot, as I think many young writers do.  We have spent our entire lives having “the proper writing form” for essays and opening paragraphs and all that jazz shoved down our throats that it’s hard to stray from that.  No matter how hard I try, that little [...]

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“Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don’t understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they’re there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it’s the other side that matters.”
-Jose Saramago (1922-present)

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If you’re at all confused about why the writers for television & movies are striking, here’s a great news story about the Executive Producer of Battlestar Galactica explaining the poor treatment of writers in Hollywood. In short, studio executives don’t care at all about the writers, which is somewhat mystifying to me. One [...]

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So here’s an unusual literary term for you: Kennings.
A ‘Kenning’ is simply a figurative expression usually composed of two or three words, though not always, that is used in place of the normal noun for a person, place, or thing.  The best way to understand a Kenning is to look at some examples:

Defender of the [...]

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A lunch-time review is a review of only the first twenty to thirty minutes of a book; usually just the first two chapters. The purpose of such a review is to find the answer to, “Would I continue reading this?”
I’ve been wanting to read Playing For Pizza by John Grisham for a while now, [...]

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The New York Times Top 10 Hardcover Fiction for the week of November 18, 2007:

Protect and Defend by Vince Flynn
Book of the Dead by Patricia Cornwell
Home to Holly Springs by Jan Karon
Playing for Pizza by John Grisham
Amazing Grace by Danielle Steel
World Without End by Ken Follett
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
The Choice by Nicholas [...]

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Chances are that if you’re writing a fantasy story or novel, then you have a castle, palace, redoubt, fortification, or some other huge building.  In that case, it’s usually a good idea to do one of two things: (1) Draw a picture of the building to get a full sense of it, or (2) base [...]

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Unlike many of my statistics & Google related posts, this is not meaningless; that is, the Young Writers Society is now the number two search result for ‘young writers’ in Google, up from #8. Why does it matter? ‘Young Writers’ is a very valuable keyword for the site, and being number two will [...]

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Does anyone watch this?  I was watching John & Kate+8 last night on TLC and they had Sara Snow come to their house and teach them certain things about going green.  Organic cooking, saving energy, recycling, even organic cleaning.  It’s really quite interesting, though I’ve never seen it.  I believe it’s on Discovery Health channel, [...]

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I’ve seen much worse Fantasy & Science Fiction covers, but the ones Chris Buchloz lists at Cracked.com are pretty bad. Funny that two of them have good reviews by legitimate sources on their cover.

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Really, what can’t you say?  We all have those words.  You know, those words that you know exactly how to spell, exactly what they mean, and exactly how they are to be pronounced, but no matter how hard you try you just can’t seem to get them out of your mouth without killing it. 
Personally, my [...]

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Want people to believe that what you’ve written is plausible? Do a little a research. Scratch that. Do a lot of research. Writing is much more enjoyable for the reader (and the writer, too) when the writer seems to have a bit of knowledge about the topic he/she is writing about.
Here are a few things you might [...]

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