I hope you enjoyed the essays I posted this week focused on Dorothy Parker’s classic story, You Were Perfectly Fine. Based on the blog traffic, you did, in fact, enjoy these posts. That makes me happy. Not because blog stats matter in the long run, but because I feel like the bigger piece of information here is that these essays were helpful and interesting. That’s all a blogger can hope for, really. In case you missed any of this week’s discussion (or if you are looking for

In Part One of the Write What You Know series, I talked a little bit about how limiting it can be if we take the advice offered by many folks who think they know what we should write about: “Write what you know!” Near the end of that post, I talked about an interesting phenomenon. Often, when workshopping a fiction piece, the sections that readers identify as “thin” or “unbelievable” or “not convincing” are those parts or pieces that are, in fact, closest to our actual experi

I was subbing last week, Spanish of all things, and the teacher I was covering for was a “floater”. That means, instead of a classroom, he has a cart for his books and bags and whatnot, and he travels from room-to-room for each period of the day. (The school is finishing a new building, and the school is growing, and it’s a temporary thing. I feel bad for the floaters though. Floating one period is one thing, but every period of every day…but, I digress.) The first class of t