When Jonathan Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal” it was in response to a population surge and economic crisis in Ireland. His proposal was to cook and serve Irish children to the English gentry as a benign solution to this crisis. It was a joke of course. His real aim was in demonstrating [...]

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Eminent.  Imminent.  Immanent.  Each is said the same way, and is even spelled similarly, which causes a lot of confusion.  However, they each have very different meanings.  So when to use which?
Imminent is the easy one; you use it when something is about to happen.  “He was in imminent danger of being run over by [...]

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Whether it’s high school or college (some of you are even younger!), writing competes for time with studying and other activities. Between balancing your schedule and the fact that many people don’t think young writers have much to say, it can be discouraging to those of us who want to someday become writers. Five tips:
–At [...]

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Veritas numquam perit - Truth never perishes. (Seneca)

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This is interesting.  From CNN.com:
Drawing on their expertise in theology, children’s literature, globalization studies and even the history of witchcraft, professors have been able to use Harry Potter to attract crowds of students eager to take on a disciplined study of the books.
Danielle Tumminio, a Yale Divinity School graduate student and the instructor for [...]

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Like sports, writing isn’t just a fun activity. It also has tremendous therapeutic value. Writing can be an outlet for venting, or to describe how you’re feeling. And as The Times of India reports, it can also ease the stress of cancer:
The simple act of writing down their deepest feelings can help [...]

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Heh, there’s a huge game of tag going on right now at YWS.  I’m not sure how long it’ll continue (I imagine that since each person tags five people that many are going to quickly tire of it), but it’s pretty interesting.  I think Jennafina started it, and so far it’s pretty cool.  The idea [...]

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Ha, a round-up of the Top 100 “Top 100 lists.”

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Back in 1996, maybe even 1995, The Young Writers Club came into being. A Computer Science professor in Turkey created it for his daughter, and the site was one of the very first writing forums on the Internet. It brought together kids around the world to share their writing for the first time. [...]

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The Hugo Award is an award given to the best achievements in sci-fi or fantasy.  It is definitely one of the most well known, and even if you’re not a sci-fi fan, you usually can’t go wrong with a Hugo winner.
The 2008 Finalists are below:
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, Fourth Estate)
Brasyl by [...]

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A lot of these look really good, so if you’re interested in taking a free creative writing course online visit Diploma Guide.
A few of them are even offered by institutions such as MIT and Yale.

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I’ve been trying to avoid any Harry Potter news for a while now, but buried within a Bloomberg article about more extraordinary heights Harry Potter books are fetching at auctions is this:
Published in 1997, the first novel in the series that turned Rowling into a billionaire was considered to have such modest prospects that Bloomsbury [...]

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Giving away books for free to increase sales seems counter-intuitive, and maybe it is.  After all, why would you buy something when you can get it for free?  However, there is sense to it.  When you have a product that is so low in demand, giving it away for free is a great way to [...]

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 Sir Arthur C. Clarke died March 18, 2008 from a cardio-respiratory attack in his adopted home of Sri Lanka.  Excerpt from Wired.com follows:
Arthur C. Clarke, the award-winning sci-fi writer and futurist most famous for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, died Wednesday in Sri Lanka. He was 90.
His writing, both fiction and nonfiction, established Clarke [...]

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That’s Saint Patty’s day! Woo!

Go pinch all those losers not wearing green!

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Heads Up Thanks To Saint Razorblade:

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Questionaut is a flash game recently developed for the BBC, and while it’s slanted toward the elementary school demographic, I still had fun with it and you might too. It has eight stages, and each stage has to do with a subject area. The first and last stage both deal with writing, so [...]

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The New York Times has an interesting article today called Start Writing the Eulogies for the Print Encyclopedia.  Excerpt:
IT has never been easier to read up on a favorite topic, whether it’s an obscure philosophy, a tiny insect or an overexposed pop star. Just don’t count on being able to thumb through the printed pages [...]

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Each year, the Society of Children Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) honor the most outstanding children’s books of the prior year, called the Golden Kite Awards.  Unlike other such awards, winners of the Golden Kite are chosen by their peers.
Fiction: Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate
Nonfiction: Muckrakers by Ann Bausum
Picture Book Text: Pierre in [...]

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Courtesy of smorgishborg:

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…the Library of Congress in Washington, DC?  Here’s some stats:
Total of 134,517,714 items in the collections, including:

20,532,692 cataloged books in the Library of Congress classification system
11,591,309 books in large type and raised characters, incunabula (books printed before 1501), monographs and serials, music, bound newspapers, pamphlets, technical reports, and other printed material
102,393,713 items in the nonclassified [...]

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Nec laudas nisi mortuos poetas: tanti non est, ut placeam, perire - If only dead poets are praised, I’d rather go unsung

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I haven’t been posting at all for the past two weeks as I’ve been concentrating on getting the Young Writers Literary Journal done.  And, now it is!
http://stores.lulu.com/yws
Check it out.

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No, not “illusions”. Allusions. They’re references to history, mythology, or even other pieces of literature. They’re also known as “nods” to another author. Literary allusions can be fun just for the fact that we recognize them. Seeing an idea or quote in a work that you just know came from another somehow tickles the mind [...]

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For me, it’s two, because of classes. “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky and “The Call of the Ocean” by Jean-Claude Mourlevat.

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Thinking about writing a mystery novel? About.com has a list of tips you should know before starting including:
– Introduce both the detective and the culprit early on.
– The detective should solve the case using only rational and scientific methods.
– In mystery writing, don’t try to fool your reader.
– Do your research.
So best of luck [...]

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1. The heroes will lose every battle, but win the war.
2. It will only rain when the heroes are exhausted and running out of food.
3. The heroes will only have horses if they are going to climb a mountain, where they won’t be able to ride the horses anyway.
4. The enemies will be killed by [...]

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I found this great blog post about speaking properly. Apparently, in England if you “speak one way, you will be running the country. If you speak another way, you will be cleaning it.” In America, this isn’t always so. Even incredebly smart people speak poorly at times. It’s nearly “hip” to have improper grammar.
For the [...]

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