Double Vision

An interesting (and true) story:

A man walked into the DMV to apply for his driver’s license, but first he needed to overcome one important hurdle: his vision test. The person administering this exam got a shock when the man pulled out two pairs of glasses and overlapped them. “I bought these glasses at the Goodwill,” he explained. “When I put the lenses together, I can see.”

He failed the test.

“Those weren’t the right ones.” He protested, chucking the first two pairs of glasses onto the ground. And then the man took two more glasses from the stash he apparently had in his pocket and tried again.

He failed the test.

Needless to say, all his attempts to pass the vision test using glass from the Goodwill ended the same way—and eventually he stormed from the DMV with an empty pocket and DMV employees musing over his strategy.    

Some Poetry

A Lost Sole*

I remember…

I went to the beach,

When the tide was high,

And the reeds caught at my calves.

The sand squeezed between my toes,

And invited me to play a game

Of lasting memory.

It’s been ten years since that day,

When I gave my sole to the beach—

I hope it remembers me.

*Also Published in Oh, Cat 2010.

A Brief Recommended Book List for Writers

There are countless reading lists out there for beginning or professional writers, each of which offers helpful selections. Here is one such list with reasons included:

• Diane Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference (Seventh Edition)
• The Hacker reference guides are well known for compiling all the information needed to properly format your citations and is a necessity for skilled writers, as well as college students. It gives thorough explanations for tackling MLA and APA—along with sample essays.
• This edition also happens to be the one that shows the changes recently made for formatting Works Cited pages (such as the rule to italicize book titles, rather than underline them).
• MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (Seventh Edition) from the Modern Language Association of America.
• This handbook is another reference guide for proper citations and more like the Hacker guide, but this one comes right from MLA.
• It goes into better detail on formatting the margins for papers and gives great tips or sources on how to do better research on any topic.
• William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
• Unlike the first two choices on this list, On Writing Well contains straightforward prose and discussions aimed exclusively towards serious writers. He gives advice on, well, nonfiction—and many genres within that category.
• His book has sections dealing with each phase in the writing process, from getting started to making revisions. Zinsser pushes for writers to be concise and avoid clutter in their work (a commendable quality). 

That’s all for now.

From one Scribe calling across the internet plains

“Cities and Thrones and Powers,

      Stand in Time’s eye,

Almost as long as flowers,

     Which daily die:

But, as new buds put forth,

    To glad new men,

Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,

   The Cities rise again.”

                                  --Puck of Pook’s Hill, Rudyard Kipling

Writers must write, as flowers must bloom—and each talent or gift needs careful attention to grow strong. I am a young woman determined to blossom into something grand, and every writer has a starting point. This site will be dedicated to writing, but if all goes well, it’ll also include much more than that.

Here are a few hopes I have for this blog: 

1.     To exhibit writings (mine and any willing visitors’) for critiques.

2.     To provide helpful information on getting our creative work published, and to note decent literary magazines or publishers.

3.     To form a writer’s circle.

4.     To grow as a person and writer.

Please enjoy a career under construction.