Writing Simplified

Flash Fiction Friday: “Into the Dungeons”

2012-05-30T22:11:00.001-05:00

The prompt for this week’s Flash Fiction Friday piece calls for my favorite type of story – a horror story! In particular, the prompt calls for the fear of the unknown. Since I have a story I’m working on that includes a big, horrible monster that is never quite revealed until the end, I chose to continue the adventures of Lizbeth and Katta as they seek it out.

With work keeping me busy lately, time got away from me and I wasn’t able to complete the scene. I’m posting what little of it I was able to finish in the hopes that it will entertain those of you who have expressed interest in what happens next in the story.

Prompt: This week write a story about perceived fear, either triggered or based on a phobia, and to make it fun use the following word list: Dark, Crunching, Eerie, Monster and Fear.
Genre: Open
Word limit: 1313
Deadline: Thursday, May 31 @ 9:00 a.m. EST

Into the Dungeons

Darkness dripped from the ceiling, a black sludge that smothered the walls. Katta's candles seemed to burn more quickly in the dungeons and it wasn't long before Lizbeth was handing her a fresh one to replace the stub. The girls' shadows looked pale against their surroundings.

“I told you it wasn't a stain.” Lizbeth's voice sounded shrill as it echoed down the passage that still lay in front of them. The cloaked forest creature had told them of the existence of a monster far more terrifying than the Cauchemars, and where to find it.

“I knew there was something odd about that black area in the tapestries. I just never thought it would be... I hope we're doing the right thing coming down here.”

Katta muttered “Whatever” and dropped the candle stub into her left pocket, startling the sleeping Shadowkin within. With an annoyed chirp, Chicky poked his head out of the pocket, then immediately ducked back inside.

“What's wrong with Chicky?” asked Lizbeth.

“I think he's hiding.” After making sure Chicky was safely tucked away, Katta started chuckling.

“What's so funny?” asked Lizbeth.

“I guess the cloaked freak in the forest was telling the truth after all.”

“Why is that so funny?”

Katta stopped chuckling and stared at Lizbeth through the struggling candle-light. “You're serious, aren't you?” Letting out a whistle, she said, “Oh boy, we really messed up when we chose you.”

Her rising irritation distracting her from her fear, Lizbeth rounded on Katta, hands on her hips. “Instead of laughing at me, you could try explaining it to me instead, you know.”

Katta stopped chuckling to stare back at the peevish girl standing before her. The smile lingering on the corner of her mouth grew wider and she coughed to hide it, pretending to fuss over the candle as it sputtered in her breath.

“Well?”

“The Shadow People don't just help you for nothing. Altruism isn't in their nature. They're sadistic and evil. Their first instinct is to deceive and destroy. If they sent us down here, then they either think they can benefit from it or that it will end us. Knowing them, probably both.”

Katta stopped talking a moment to let her words sink in. She continued to walk down the passage, trusting Lizbeth to follow. “Nothing good can ever come of dealing with the Shadow People. But it's the only choice we have left.”

“You really hate them, don't you?” Lizbeth panted, trotting beside Katta to keep up with her longer strides.

“You think? I've watched them as they corrupted and killed children. I saw them literally tear a girl apart and consume her. They treat their own kind hardly better.”

“What about Chicky?”

“What about him?” Katta snapped. “He's different. He's nothing like the other Shadow People.” She cupped the pocket where he hid protectively and stalked off angrily.

“I didn't mean to imply... I'm sorry,” Lizbeth called after apologetically. Then, more loudly, “Where are you going?”

“Where do you think I'm going?” Katta snapped again.

“It's just...we've been that way.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When we first came down here, we turned left at the first intersection. After that, we took another left and then the passage curved to the left again. If you go that way, you'll be going back towards the first left we took.”

“You mean I'll be going in a circle?” Katta asked, her irritation with Lizbeth abating while her frustration with the endless passageways increased.

When Lizbeth nodded, Katta cursed and hurled the candle she held into the darkness. Lizbeth gasped and started after it, “We need that!”

The flame was smothered by the darkness as soon as it left Katta's hand, the candle making a soft thud as it landed and rolled away somewhere in the blackness that now enveloped the girls.

In the silence, the girls heard a low rumble.

“What was that?” Lizbeth squeaked.

“I don't know, but Chicky's not happy about it.”

Frightened chirps were coming from the pocket the Shadowkin hid within and Katta placed one hand inside to comfort him.

“I don't feel good about this either,” Lizbeth said as the rumble grew into the unmistakable sound of a growl. “Light another candle, Katta, quickly, before something hap-”

Dirt and dust fell onto the girls and into their eyes as the growl grew, shaking the walls around them. Lizbeth clapped her hands over her ears and started to scream.

Photo credit: Naeema Campbell

New Template and Comment System

2012-05-27T10:44:00.001-05:00

After putting it off for months, I have finally gotten around to over-hauling the website’s template and comment system. There were little issues here and there that needed addressing in the template and Blogger’s built-in comment system wasn’t as versatile as readers wanted (not to mention it wouldn’t let me reply to individual comments).

I loved the old green template, but I think I’ve found one that, after I made a few modifications to the code, is equally clean and simple. Blue is my favorite color anyway, so the new look has quickly grown on me. I’m still tweaking fonts and sizes, so if there is anything on the page that is difficult for you to read or that you think could look better, let me know via e-mail or by leaving a comment in the new comment system.

The chief complaint I heard about the Blogger comment system was the need for a Google account to post a comment. I decided to use Disqus because it gives readers the choice of leaving a comment anonymously as a “guest” or through their Disqus, Google, Open ID, Twitter, or Yahoo accounts. It even lets me import all my Blogger comments so I don’t lose any valuable feedback!

Let me know what you think!

Photo credit: Photo Bunny

Why Grammar Check Leaves Much to Be Desired

2012-05-11T21:18:00.001-05:00

The “Dear John” letter pictured above has been used for decades to illustrate the importance of punctuation. Running each version of it through Microsoft Word reveals no errors and no mention of the existence of the other version. While spelling is fairly straight forward to check, grammar is much more ambiguous. Depending on the context, the removal or addition of a comma can alter the entire meaning of a sentence with it still remaining grammatically correct. This letter is a clear example of that!

Errors Grammar Check Cannot Find

Dr. Daniel Kies from the College of DuPage has researched the topic extensively for ten years. By running text that contains 20 common usage errors through grammar checkers, he has documented how well they work. His findings aren’t pretty. Not only did grammar checkers catch less than half of the 20 errors, they often offered the wrong advice for correcting the error. He describes the results of his research and their importance much more eloquently than I could paraphrase it; please, please, please read it here on his web page.

One of the many grammar errors that grammar checkers cannot detect is the inappropriate use of an essential or non-essential clause. A single comma is all that differentiates the two. This and other syntactical choices that are based on semantics will always give grammar checkers problems.

Computers cannot think and therefore cannot intuit meaning from words. This limitation is why it is essential that you or someone you trust proofreads your work. Do NOT rely on your word processor to catch grammar errors for you.

More Evidence on the Issue

Dr. Sandeep Krishnamurty from the University of Washington has created a list of examples demonstrating the futility of using Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checkers.
Nick Wright has a shocking example of a paragraph that Microsoft Word thinks contains no grammar errors.
Yu Hong Wei and Graham Davies present research assessing the effectiveness of Grammatik V, a popular style and grammar checker used by software programs.

With how easy it is for spell checking programs to make errors, it baffles me that anyone would put their trust in a program that attempts to check the correctness of grammar, a much more complex process.

Flash Fiction Friday: “The Shadows That Bind”

2012-04-18T22:50:00.001-05:00

I saw the prompt for this week and knew I had to find the time to take part. After missing last week’s prompt, I wasn’t about to let another fantasy prompt slip through my fingers without at least a token effort. I decided to tell the story of Chicky, the shadowkin creature featured in a previous story. Enjoy!

Prompt: Take your typical fairy tale villain or monster and make them the protagonist. Must use “something wicked this way comes” as a line in the story.
Genre: Any
Word Limit: 1,200 words
Deadline: 4/19 by 9:00 AM ET

The Shadows That Bind

Dozens of the creatures waited outside the clearing, blending seamlessly with the shadows. If they wished, they could melt into the darkness and hide their grotesque forms, two glowing embers the only sign of their presence. But here in this forest there was no need for subterfuge; ensnared by their own kind, they waited, trapped here, for their yearly feeding.

Quiet as a whisper on a breeze, they fidgeted in anticipation, watching as the group drew nearer to the forest’s edge. They sensed the presence of kin and another mortal darkness, maddeningly delectable. Once the trio entered the clearing, snarls erupted from the forest as the creatures recognized their captors.

Lord Cauchemar threw back his head and laughed with glee. Turning to Lady Cauchemar , he said loudly enough to be heard over the commotion their arrival had caused, “Look at the thanks we get, my dear. We house these things without ever asking for a coin in rent and this is how they treat us. Why, we’ve even brought food, a veritable feast, for them!”

A gravelly voice rang out across the clearing, laughing humorlessly. “You throw your scraps to us and call it a banquet. That girl is nothing more than a shell; she would not satisfy the smallest of us.”

Lady Cauchemar coughed politely and began to straighten the ruffles on Nora’s dress. Her soprano was softer, but resonated as easily as her husband’s voice had across the field. “I see you still speak for the others, Muddathir.”

A cloaked figure stepped forward to the clearing’s edge and spat into the clearing. “You have not the power to name me.”

Lady Cauchemar smiled good humoredly in reply. “Be careful of your choice of raiment or you will name yourself.”

Muddathir responded with silence, a silence that was taken up by the rest of the forest’s denizens. The silence was so deep and so dark that tendrils of it reached out towards the Cauchemars with killing intent. Lord Cauchemar chuckled, brushing the group’s power away as though it were dust on his lapel.

“I didn’t realize you were all so picky. If you don’t want our gift, then we’ll take her away.”

Lord Cauchemar waited a moment for a response, his grin widening when he saw looks of fear spread through the assembled crowd. When the silence continued, he shrugged and motioned to his wife to lead Nora away. The sight of Nora’s back was too much for the creatures to bear and tormented wails filled the night.

“Stop…. You would not leave us here to starve. Why keep us here if only to watch us die?”

Madduthir’s hoarse voice was the cry that halted theCauchemars’ departure. Spinning around, Lord Cauchemar chortled. “You exist to entertain us, of course. Honestly, you, Madduthir, are the most entertaining of all. Tell me, have you found another among these brutes who can speak, who can reason? Or are you still alone, surrounded by animals?”

“They are my kin. Voiceless though they may be, they are not as mindless as you believe.”

Madduthir’s response seemed to amuse the Cauchemars because they laughed hard, gasping for air they did not need to breathe. “What sentiment coming from a monster!” Wiping tears, Lady Cauchemar pushed Nora towards the forest, saying “I will be laughing for months. Here, you’ve earned your meal.”

Gaunt with hunger, the shadow creatures barely managed to restrain themselves when the girl stepped towards them. Some creatures were so starved, they were mere shadows of themselves, gray where they should have been a deep onyx.

The crunch of leaves under her boots was the only sound in the clearing as Nora walked mechanically towards the clearing’s edge. The closer she came to the forest’s edge, the more animated the shadows became, shoving one another and reaching out desperately with their clawed fingers towards the approaching girl. One smaller shadow pushed its way across the edge and into the clearing. Flapping paper thin wings, it launched itself at Nora, beak outstretched.

When it was mere inches away from tearing into the girl, a clawed appendage swatted it out of the air with enough force to send it sailing across the field and into a tree. “ENOUGH!”

Madduthir’s shout cut through the cacophony as easily as it had cut through the shadow a moment before. “Form a line. Everyone will partake of her.”

“Isn’t that sweet? You did not tell us you were their mother, Madduthir,” Lord Cauchemar called out.

Madduthir glared at the Cauchemars, as she knew they expected. Their resulting laughter kept them from noticing a figure slip into the woods.

***

Katta was frantic to find the baby bird she’d seen heartlessly flung in this direction. After working for them for 5 years, she knew the Cauchemars were evil, but she’d had no idea they were actually monsters. The things in the forest were terrifying. To think they were the same type of creature…

“Where are you?” she whispered as quietly as she could in the darkness. She’d never seen a bird even come near the Outer Ward and now she knew why. It was just a baby and that thing hit it. She couldn’t save Nora, but was damned if she couldn’t at least save this chick.

Leaves rustled near her feet and she sighed in relief. “Thank goodness you’re not dead.” Leaning down, she reached towards the bird when it suddenly attacked her hands. Swallowing a cry of pain, she snatched her hands back, swatting at the bird to dislodge its beak from her fingers. It fell on its back and chirped mournfully. Her eyes adjusting to the forest’s darkness, Katta could see that it was severely injured, one wing barely attached as it writhed on the ground. Looking at the blood dripping from her fingers, she suddenly realized what the bird was.

“You’re one of those shadow things.” Glancing back at the clearing, Katta was alarmed to see the Cauchemars walking away. With their protection gone, there was nothing to keep the creatures from attacking her. Looking at the injured creature, Katta took less than a minute to make up her mind. Scooping him up, she started to run back towards the castle.

“I found you and I’m going to take care of you, little one, no matter what you are.”

Back in the darkness of the forest, a cloaked shadow began to laugh a low, raspy laugh.

Photo credit: Ruben Bo

Online Research Tools

2012-04-17T15:02:00.001-05:00

It’s that time of year again! Students are scrambling to get research projects completed (or, in many cases, started!) and researchers are rushing to present their findings at conferences and in grant proposals. The right tools can make the process of accumulating, sorting through, and synthesizing research significantly easier, freeing up time and energy for writing.

Whether you're writing a grant proposal or a children's book, one of the most important steps to producing a well written product is the collection and management of all your research. If your research is unorganized or inaccessible, it will be of no help to you in the writing process. These applications provide a variety of research management solutions that range from clipping images and words from web sites to placing your references in the appropriate citation format.

Some of these research tools allow syndication to social media sites. While that may sound like an irrelevant feature when it comes to what you really need for researching your writing project, keep in mind that society is now “wired.” If you plan on making your writing available to the public (whether for free or for a price), you would benefit greatly from marketing it yourself online to call more attention to it.

I earn NO kick-backs or revenue from any of the services listed in this post. My reviews of each product are as objective as human nature allows. Keep in mind that things change at a rapid pace online, and what was current information may be out of date in a matter of months or weeks. Always double-check my notes yourself before committing to any service.

Whether you’re a student or professional, I hope you’ll find the following list of online research tools I’ve amassed over the years helpful.

Delicious
Blinklist
Yahoo! Bookmarks
Google Bookmarks
Windows Live SkyDrive
Diigo
Lilisto
CiteULike
Connotea
Mendeley
Evernote
Zotero
Clipmarks
Pinboard
ClipClip
Instapaper
Read It Later
Readmeo
ToRead
Google Notebook
Zoho Notebook
Marrows
Memonic

Delicious

Formerly known as Del.icio.us, Delicious is a free online social bookmarking program that lets you store your bookmarks in an online database. Not only does that mean that you can track dozens of bookmarks from any device with an internet connection, but it also means you can share those bookmarks with anyone you wish.

Access your bookmarks online through the Delicious webpage.
Share bookmarks with friends or mark them private for your eyes only.
Associate tags with bookmarks for easy organizing.
Add bookmarks with a click of a button using the Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explore plugins or a bookmarklet compatible with any browser.
Integrate your bookmarks into a blog or social networking site using a widget.

I've used Delicious for years now (since before they changed their name!) and am quite pleased with the service. It's a no-frills site that does exactly what it was created to do: organize and catalogue your bookmarks online. If you don't use Delicious, please consider using any other online bookmarking service; having ready access to research from any computer means being able to work even when you left your laptop at home.

Learn more about Delicious at http://www.delicious.com.

Blinklist

Not as popular as other free bookmarking sites, Blinklist has still been around since 2005. It provides the same services other bookmarking sites do, with a few key differences.

Log in using an Open ID or a Blinklist account.
Save webpages with a click of a button using a bookmarklet in your favorite browser.
Access bookmarks online through the Blinklist webpage.
Use the built-in search function to search through your bookmarks at a boasted 0.18 seconds.
Save a copy of the pages you bookmark on your hard drive, for offline viewing.
Share your links with friends or set up private groups with which to share links.
Discover related webpages that Blinklist recommends you visit based on what you bookmark.
Use Blinklist in your native language: English, Suomi, Deutsch, Italiano, Français, Español, Svenska, or Portugues.

Because Blinklist doesn't have as large a following as some of the other bookmarking services, it's worth backing up your bookmarks (as it is with any bookmarking site you use) just in case this goes the way of Ma.gnolia and Furl.

Learn more about Blinklist at http://blinklist.com.

Yahoo! Bookmarks

Yahoo! Bookmarks is a recent addition to the free social bookmarking services available online. The number of options it offers you for cataloguing and sharing bookmarks makes it a worthy contender for your patronage. If you already have an account with Yahoo!, you automatically also have a Yahoo! Bookmarks account.

Sign in using your Yahoo! user ID and password.
Bookmark websites using a bookmarklet in your bookmark toolbar or in the Yahoo! toolbar.
Organize bookmarks into folders AND with tags.
Reorganize bookmarks using drag-and-drop management.
View bookmarks in grid view, list view, or full view.
Share bookmarks with friends through e-mail or instant message.
Search using a search function that looks through bookmark titles, tags, descriptions, and each website.

If I didn't already have an established account with Delicious, the increased functionality of Yahoo! Bookmarks would be quite tempting. The only real downside to this service is its lack of integrated social media tools. There is no RSS feed to a page others can subscribe to or visit to see your recent bookmarks.

Learn more about Yahoo! Bookmarks at http://bookmarks.yahoo.com.

Google Bookmarks

Like other online bookmarking services, Google Bookmarks allows you to save your bookmarks online for easy access from any internet browser. Because the service is provided by Google, your bookmarks are integrated into your Google account and you can also access them through the various browser add-ons or desktop programs Google provides. Like other Google services, Google Bookmarks is free.

Add bookmarks to your account by clicking a bookmarklet, through the Google Toolbar, through Google Maps, or by clicking the star next to a result in Google Search.
Access your bookmarks from the Google Bookmarks homepage, the Google Toolbar, or the iGoogle gadget.
Organize your content using labels and/or lists.
Make lists public or private.
Allow collaborators access to your lists.

Google is a company that focuses on the social aspect of internet browsing, as evidenced by their recent release of the Google+ service. If that service is indeed as successful as it was heralded to be and surpasses Facebook in popularity, hosting your bookmarks with Google might not be a bad idea if your goal is to incorporate social media.

Learn more about Google Bookmarks at https://www.google.com/bookmarks.

Windows Live SkyDrive

Formerly titled Windows Live Favorites, this free web service is Microsoft's version of the Google suite of services. Each user is given 25GB of online storage for files, photos, and bookmarks. Like Google, there is built-in sharing that allows you to share your files and collaborate with other Windows Live users. If you are looking for a place to host your research and drafts for easy viewing from any device with an internet connection, Windows Live may be the solution that works for you.

Learn more about Windows Live SkyDrive at http://explore.live.com/windows-live-skydrive.

Diigo

Although Diigo began as a simple free online bookmarking service, over the years it has evolved into so much more. Not only can you bookmark sites, you can highlight information online, make notes directly onto webpages, save video/audio/photo information from a site, and collaborate with other Diigo users.

Bookmark webpages using a drag-and-drop “Diigolet” or simple bookmarklet in any browser.
Highlight and add sticky notes using the Web Highlighter on Chrome or the Diigo toolbar in IE or Firefox.
Highlight in different colors and choose from two types of sticky notes.
Use Diigo on an iPad, iPhone, or Android phone.
Publish bookmarks, annotations and notes directly to your blog, e-mail, Twitter, or Facebook.
Automatically add tweets you favorite on Twitter to your Diigo account.
Archive entire webpages for offline viewing.
Organize bookmarks by tags and/or lists.
Search your library using several different search modes.
Make bookmarks and annotations public or private.
Search Diigo users by tags and add them to your Diigo network.
Create public or private groups in Diigo and research collaboratively with other Diigo users.

Diigo's free service entitles you to unlimited bookmarks, 1k highlights per year, and 30 total cached webpages. Besides the free service, Diigo offers two upgraded plans that cost a modest amount of money. For $20/year, the basic plan includes unlimited highlights, full text search, and no ads. For $40/year, the premium plan includes everything the basic plan offers as well as unlimited cached pages, unlimited screen captures, and priority tech support.

Learn more about Diigo at http://www.diigo.com.

Lilisto

Lilisto is a free private and public online bookmark manager. Developed by Kristoff Bertram, it is not as extensive as other bookkmark managers that have a crew of developers running it. If you're looking for simplicity, this service is the one that will appeal most to you.

Bookmark sites with a click of a bookmarklet you can use from your bookmark toolbar in your favorite browser.
Organize your bookmarks with tags.
Drag bookmarks into categories for a second layer of organization.
Search your bookmarks by tags or search query.
See how often you visit a site and favorite the ones you visit most frequently.
Post your bookmarks directly to Facebook.
Enjoy the clean, ad-free user interface of Lilisto.

Although Lilisto does not have as many features as other bookmark managers like Delicious or Diigo, I appreciate the minimalist approach to its design and usability. The simplicity is a breath of fresh air in a sea of services bloated with unnecessary features. If you find yourself drowning in the plethora of features available in other services and want to get back to the basics, give Lilisto a chance.

Learn more about Lilisto at http://www.lilisto.com/home.

CiteULike

Contrary to the name, this service does not actually cite your research for you. Instead, it is a free service that helps you store, organize, and share the scholarly articles you are reading.

Save article details to your CiteULike account using a bookmarklet in your favorite browser.
Search groups to see what articles they are saving that are relevant to your research.
Browse popular saved articles in the CiteGeist library.
Browse the table of contents of over 13,500 peer-reviewed journals to see what's new.
Browse recommendations sent to you by CiteULike based on articles you are saving.
Connect with other users interested in the same research fields.

While this certainly seems like a neat service, the articles that you are collecting are limited to the abstract section. Clicking on the link back to the original article brings up a sign-in page to the database that hosted the article. Having to dig out log-in information for individual databases, especially if you found the article using a multi-journal database such as JSTOR, is a pain. I personally would rather just save each file as as .pdf to my harddrive and search through them later. That way I at least have permanent access to the full-text of the article.

Learn more about CiteULike at http://www.citeulike.org.

Connotea

Aimed at academics, Connotea describes itself as “free online reference management for researchers, clinicians and scientists.”

Save links to references with the click of a bookmarklet – Connotea will add the bibliographic information to references automatically.
Tag saved references with as many tags as you like.
Share your bookmarks or mark some as private.
Access your library online from your Connotea account.
Share links with colleagues through e-mail or through a link to your Connotea library.
Browse other Connotea users' public bookmarks.
Import and export your references collectively to a desktop reference manager.
No storage limit on references saved.

Connotea is a powerful reference manager for researchers and I highly recommend it if you regularly search through peer-reviewed journals or use a desktop reference manager, like EndNote or Sente.

Learn more about Connotea at http://www.connotea.org.

Mendeley

Similar to other free reference managers, Mendeley sets itself apart with its powerful features and ease of use. It makes the task of organizing research and citing it easy and enjoyable. It is impossible to be disorganized when using Mendeley, no matter how hard you may try. Used by some of the world's leading research institutions and funded by some of the people behind Skype, Last.fm, and Warner Music, you don't have to fear that support for Mendeley will disappear anytime soon.

Add links to references with a click of a button.
Enjoy built in support for Mendeley in over 30 online research databases.
Fully compatible with Word 2003, 2007, 2010; Mac Word 2008, 2011; Open Office 3.2; and BibTeX.
Install plugins and activate features with a click of a button.
Cite in over 1,000 journal styles or create your own citation style.
Create bibliographies automatically in your word processing program.
Collaborate on bibliographies with colleagues through a private group.
Open multiple pdf files in separate tabs with your research library one click away.
Annotate, highlight, and add sticky notes directly to pdf documents.
Create private groups and share annotations with colleagues.
Save and print annotations on pdf files.
Organize research in your Library and sort through papers by author, title, journal, and more.
Search the full text of every article in your library when you run a search.
Use the simple navigation to find articles easily; no more difficult file names!
Import articles from websites, other research software, or drag and drop files yourself.
Make Mendeley “watch” a folder and automatically add files you add to that folder to your library.
Collaborate easily with a newsfeed of your colleagues research additions or annotations.
Share files and folders with colleagues and work together on papers in real time.
Use Mendeley's 1GB of free online storage to backup and synchronize your library across your desktop, web, and mobile device.
Access your library across multiple computers with Mendeley installed on each.
Use Mendeley on a Macintosh, Windows PC, or Linux PC.
Access your library online through Mendeley's website and work from any computer with internet access.
Discover new research and socialize through Mendeley's public groups.
Build an online presence in the research field through your Mendeley profile.

Where was Mendeley when I was in graduate school?! I could have definitely used this research manger back when I was in school. Its design is easy on the eyes, it makes having to organize articles and citations a thing of the past, and it automates many of the time-consuming tasks of writing a research paper. When so many organizations and individuals use Mendeley as their choice of research management software, you'll be in good company if you use it. And with a pricetag of free, you can try it out at no cost to yourself.

Learn more about Mendeley at http://www.mendeley.com.

Evernote

Recognizable by its elephant logo, Evernote is a note organization system that has both a free and a premium version. While it includes a desktop application (available only for Windows and Mac), its true power lies in its ability to sync your notes with its online system, letting you access them from any computer, phone, or alternate device with access to the internet.

Clip words or pictures from webpages.
Upload your own documents (free users are limited to .pdf documents).
Upload photos from your phone, scanner, or computer.
Access dozens of online tutorial videos.
Search through your clippings and documents quickly with the search function.

Evernote is quite comprehensive in allowing you to store virtually anything in its system, and it has a devoted user-base that swears by it. The free version is powerful enough for most users, but you do have the option of purchasing a premium account if you need more functionality and more bandwidth. The premium package allows you up to 1G of uploads, .pdf searchability, lets you upload any file type (not just .pdf), gives you access to your note history, increases the speed of image recognition, pushes you to the front of the line in tech support, and eliminates advertising. Premium will cost you $5/month or $45/year. If Evernote is your choice for research organization, use the free version to start with and upgrade to premium only if the amount of information you are saving justifies the cost.

You can learn more about Evernote at http://www.evernote.com.

Zotero

Zotero is a very powerful research tool that lets you not only store your research, but also cite it properly. Created by George Mason University, this behemoth of a research tool was originally intended for use by academics. You don't have to be a scholar to reap the benefits of this tool, however, and its future development seems to be taking it in directions that will make it even more useful than it already is.

Capture information from any web resource (book, magazine, web page, photo gallery, etc.) you are looking at with a single click of a button.
Archive entire web pages in your library.
Upload and store a variety of file types in your library (.pdf, spreadsheets, images, etc.)
Tag research with labels for easier searching and access.
Add notes alongside your research.
Cite research in any major citation style (including thousands of journal-specific styles).
Drop citations into Word or OpenOffice through plugins.
Drag and drop bibliographies into e-mails, blog posts, or any word processor.

Each Zotero user is allotted 100MB of free online storage, with more storage available for a modest monetary investment. $20/year will get you 1G, $60/year will purchase 5G, and so on. I've used Zotero before and found it to be user-friendly. The number of different things it can do is comparable to much more expensive software programs like EndNote and Sente, but at a fraction of the cost (and that's if you purchase extra storage!).

You can learn more about Zotero at http://www.zotero.org.

Clipmarks

Run by a cool group of guys, Clipmarks lets you literally cut text, images, and video out of any site and store it in your Clipmarks online account. Because all storage is online, you can access your data from any device that is connected to the internet. While you can see other people's clips (be careful that you don't spend too much time just browsing through others' clips!), you have the option to make your own clips private if you don't want others to see your collection.

Clip directly from Firefox and Internet Explorer using a browser plugin.
Syndicate your clips to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and more.
Post clips to your blog using direct blogging integration.
Print only your clips to save paper and time.
Search your (or others') collections with the search function.
Edit or delete clips after you've clipped them.
Add comments to clips with no character limitation.
Organize the clips in your collection into folders.

There is a 1,000 character limit on clips, so if you are looking at a very long article online, you may have to break it up into 2 or 3 clippings. While that may feel cumbersome, remember that you don't need to clip articles in their entirety; clip the bibliographic information you'll need for citations and the parts of the article that are relevant for your purposes.

Recently, Clipmark developers have created another service called Amplify. This service is almost identical to Clipmarks (and features full integration with Clipmarks.com) EXCEPT that the bookmarklet is embeddable in ALL web browsers. So if you prefer to browse using Opera, Safari, Google Chrome, or even Flox, you can now use Amplify to get all the benefits of Clipmarks for your specific browser.

Clipmarks and Amplify are both free services with no disclosed limit on storage space.

Learn more about Clipmarks at http://clipmarks.com/.

Learn more about Amplify at http://amplify.com/.

Pinboard

Frequently compared to Delicious, Pinboard's tagline is “Social bookmarking for introverts.” The site aims to cater more to users' need for speed and utility, and less to users' social networking needs. While not free, the modest fee of $9.36 (it goes up a small increment with each new sign-up) helps keep the service free of spammers and advertisements. If you need added storage, Pinboard offers archival accounts for $25/year. These accounts will store a complete cached copy of every bookmark you make as well as allow users full-text search of their entries.

Use from any browser using a bookmarklet.
Add notes to and tag entries when you bookmark them.
Import your existing bookmarks from Delicious, Diigo, Ma.gnolia, and other sources.
Mirror public bookmarks you make on Delicious, Instapaper, Read It Later, and Google Reader.
Save notes to yourself as though they were bookmarked pages.
Tag bookmarks for easy cataloguing.
Mark bookmarks you don't want others to see as private.

If your emphasis is on collecting research and not on publicizing your work at the same time, the no-frills functionality of Pinboard will appeal to you.

Learn more about Pinboard at http://pinboard.in.

ClipClip

Self-described as an "online scrapbook," ClipClip is a free web service that lets you "clip" text and images from webpages without having to bookmark the entire webpage.

Clip text and images using a bookmarklet in your favorite browser.
Access your clips online from your ClipClip account.
Choose which clips to make private or make them all public.
Tag and comment clippings.
Organize clippings into folders.
E-mail clips to friends and family.
Create or join existing groups to share clips easily.

While I readily admit that ClipClip is a neat service that would make researching projects much more efficient, it's almost identical in function to Clipmarks. Clipmarks is also more popular and has the added feature of being fully integrated with most major web browsers through a downloadable plugin. The choice is ultimately yours, and if you enjoy supporting the underdog, ClipClip would be the way to go.

Learn more about ClipClip at http://www.clipclip.org.

Instapaper

Created and maintained by Marco Arment, Instapaper is a free online tool that I absolutely love and have used for several years now without problem. It allows you to “save” webpages and articles for later viewing by clicking a button in your bookmark toolbar.

Use from any web browser.
Organize articles and webpages into folders.
Save webpages as text only to get rid of annoying ads or photos.
E-mail links or long messages directly to your Instapaper account for later viewing.
Send articles to Instapaper directly from Google Reader or any of over 140 iPad and iPhone supported apps.
Download reading material for offline viewing as a Word document, Kindle or ePub ebook.

When you're researching writing projects, you will often come across articles and websites that you are either too tired or in too much of a hurry to read fully. Normally I would bookmark them to come back to them later. I highly recommend that you use either Instapaper or another similar service to keep your bookmarks menu free from clutter.

Learn more about Instapaper at http://www.instapaper.com.

Read It Later

Created by Nathan Weiner, Read It Later is another free online tool that is almost identical in fuction to Instapaper. There are a few differences between the two that are worth noting, however.

Use the bookmarklet from any web browser (Firefox, Chrome, and Safari have extensions you can install).
Edit and tag entries to categorize them for easy organizing.
Download reading material for offline viewing.
Save webpages as text to get rid of annoying ads or photos.
Share an article when you're done reading it through a number of social media sites.

Incredibly popular, Read It Later has more than 2 million users. If I were not already a satisfied user of Instapaper, I would definitely give Read It Later a try.

Learn more about Read It Later at http://readitlaterlist.com.

Readmeo

Readmeo is a free online service that allows you to bookmark webpages to return to later when you have more time to read them. Similar to a bookmarking service, the purpose of Readmeo is to save reading material.

Save webpages to your Readmeo account using a bookmarklet.
Organize your saved pages into folders.
Add stars next to particularly important pages.

If you dislike InstaPaper and ReadItLater, Readmeo's simplicity may appeal to you. The lack of social media integration makes Readme better suited for use as a bookmark manager of webpages you want to revisit later, but don't necessarily want cluttering up your main bookmark manager service.

Learn more about Readmeo at http://readmeo.com.

ToRead

ToRead is a free e-mail bookmarking service that lets you read webpages offline. It is very limited in its scope, but can be very useful if you're most comfortable accessing e-mail during the day and enjoy (or need to be) reading material offline. By dragging the bookmarklet into your favorite browser, you can click the button anytime and automatically e-mail yourself the contents of whatever webpage you were looking at. Unregistering from the service is included in your registration confirmation e-mail (which can be regenerated if you happen to lose it), so you can try this service out without fear of getting stuck with an account you don't want in the future. Unless you need the offline functionality of this service, InstaPaper and ReadLater provide the same function with a wider array of reading options.

Learn more about ToRead at http://toread.cc/.

Google Notebook

Google Notebook is a part of the Google suite of services. (If you have not yet looked at all of the services that Google offers, please consider going to Google.com and clicking on the “more” option to see a list of all the free applications Google has developed.) Google Notebook is free web clipping/note storing service that allows you to clip the parts of webpages you wish to keep and type notes for safe-keeping as well. It is meant to be a place to virtually store ideas, research, and anything else you would normally jot down in a physical notebook.

Log in to your Google Notebook using your Google account.
Install a browser extension for Internet Explorer and Firefox to clip, bookmark, or create notes without leaving the browser screen.
Create multiple notebooks and create sections within notebooks.
Organize bookmarks, text notes, and clippings into notebooks and/or using labels.
Search your notebook(s) content with a search function.
Export all your information to Google Docs.
Invite collaborators to add to or delete from your notebook contents.
Share your notebook as a public web page.
Easily remove collaborators or notebook webpages if you change your mind about sharing.

When I was in graduate school, classmates would type their notes directly into Google Notebook while listening to the professsor lecture. It was convenient, free, and always available via the internet. Unfortunately, Google is no longer developing Google Notebook, which means there will be no future updates and it is not open to new users. Unless you already have an account with Google and activated your Google Notebook user acount, you're out of luck.

Learn more about Google Notebook at http://www.google.com/notebook.

Zoho Notebook

Similar in function to Google Notebook, Zoho Notebook is a productivity application provided by Zoho.com. Its main function is to help you collect and access research or other information online.

Sign in using your Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, Google Apps, or Zoho account.
Create text, image, video, or audio content and embed them directly into your notebook pages.
Clip information from webpages using the Firefox browser plugin.
Attach files directly to notebook pages.
Embed RSS feeds as objects directly into your notebook pages or add entire webpages into your notebook.
Create multiple notebooks and pages within notebooks.
Integrate other Zoho services into your notebook or create new spreadsheets or writer pages directly in your Zoho notebook.
Share notebooks, individual pages, or parts of a page with collaborators or publish them online.
Collaborators can work on one notebook at the same time making the notebook a virtual whiteboard.
Skype and Zoho chat are integrated into shared notebooks so you can call or chat with collaborators who are online.
Easily revoke sharing privileges if you change your mind.
Save work automatically and revert back to previous versions if need be.

Like Google, Zoho is an online application suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet application, calendar, planner, and notebook (to name a few). Zoho Notebook is just one of the applications available and if you are interested in hosting your files online and have yet to choose a service provider, I recommend you check Zoho out.

Learn more about Zoho Notebook at https://notebook.zoho.com.

Marrows

Developed by a Turkish startup, Marrows is a free online social bookmarking/web clipping service that emphasizes the social nature of the Internet. Instead of trying to compete with similar services like Delicious and Clipmarks, it aims to become a useful tool in a researcher's toolbox.

Sign in with Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, or create a Marro.ws account.
Bookmark sites using the Firefox or Chrome add-ons or a bookmarklet in your favorite browser's bookmark toolbar.
Clip only the parts of a webpage or article you want and type and store notes alongside your clippings.
Mark bookmarks as public or private.
Organize your saved bookmarks and notes into categories and create tags for items.
Download your (or others'!) saved clips and bookmarks in PDF, HTML, DOC, or TXT format.
Connect with and follow other Marrows users.
Share your bookmarks and notes with others through RSS feed, Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail.
Join and create groups of users with similar interests.
Track your items and comments on a line graph and see your recent activity.

I am quite impressed with this service. Despite not being very old, it rivals its competitors in terms of user friendliness and features. It even has features the more established bookmarking services lack! I do hope this service gains popularity; once it does, I would have no reservations about switching over to it. There is one small issue, however, with Marrows: Reading the tour and “about” sections of the website, it's quite clear that Marrows was launched by people whose first language is not English. Only a few grammar errors actually show up in the Marrows service itself once you log in because you generate most of the content on your Marrows webpage.

Learn more about Marrows at http://marro.ws.

Memonic

Memonic is a free web service that lets you capture, organize, and share information. Not only does Memonic allow you to clip web pages, save them for later viewing, bookmark them, write notes, and “gather” information; it does all of this while sporting a clean, creative user-interface that is very easy on the eyes.

Sign-in using your Facebook, Twitter, or Memonic account.
Install Memonic plug-ins for Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, or Opera.
Download Memonic applications for a web browser, iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows, or Mac.
Clip web content.
Create notes.
Save webpages for later viewing.
Bookmark webpages.
Use the “Gathering” mode for long research sessions.
Take screenshots and clip information from Word and other applications using the Windows destop app.
Forward e-mails and attachments directly to your Memonic collection.
Organize your content in folders, tags, and groups.
Make your content public or private or viewable only by those you invite.
Share content directly to Facebook or Twitter or e-mail.
Collaborate with others by creating or joining groups.
Customize the look of your Memonic page.
Save paper by creating super compact printouts.

Memonic easily bundles the services provided by web sites like Clipmarks, Delicious, ReadItLater, and others into one great looking site. The only downside is you are limited to only 100 notes, 3 groups, and 2 MB max per attachment when you sign-up for a free account. The premium account will cost you $28/year and allows you the ability to create an unlimited number of notes, create/join an unlimited number of groups, upload attachments that are up to 20 MB in size, and use “Gathering” mode (unavailable to free users). If you're a student, you might want to look into the student discount Memonic offers. If not, take the tour and decide whether you like the bundled features enough to pay for one service instead of signing up for several different services that provide more storage for their free accounts.

Learn more about Memonic at http://www.memonic.com.

***

I’m only a single person and the Internet is ever so vast! Let me know if there’s a research tool I’ve missed that you think belongs on this list.

Note: All logos are the property of their respective owners.

Photo credit: Zzpza

Flash Fiction Friday: “Bubbles’ Revenge”

2012-04-04T22:51:00.001-05:00

The prompt for this week on Flash Fiction Friday included gorgeous artwork by the very talented Steven Russell Black. He generously gave his permission for use of any of his “Drawing a Day” drawings as inspiration for stories.

What follows is the story that unfolded in my mind’s eye when I looked at Steve’s Day 6 picture of a girl lying down underwater with pennies on her eyes as fish swim by. The caption was “Sometimes the ferryman’s coins go to the fishes.”

Prompt: Use one of the images from Steven Russell Black’s Drawing A Day, found on his blog or Facebook page.
Genre: Any
Word Limit: 1,500 words
Deadline: 4/5 by 9:00 AM ET

Bubbles’ Revenge

It wasn’t fair. Bubbles had been in the prime of his life, full of vigor and beauty. He’d learned to recognize her when she approached his bowl and swam up to the top to wait for her to toss a handful of flakes in for him. Who knows what else he might have learned if his life hadn’t been cruelly snuffed out.

Bubbles deserved vengeance, but she didn’t know how to go about delivering his retribution. How much suffering would Bubbles want Tom to go through for feeding him to the cat? Did he want Tom to feel the same pain he felt when Cookie’s jaws crushed the life out of his small body? How could she possibly replicate that for Tom? What if Bubbles had something entirely different in mind? Or what if Bubbles didn’t want revenge at all?

She needed to contact him and ask him. That was the only way she’d be able to really do right by him. She’d read in a library book that she could get in touch with him if she conducted a séance over his body, but that was impossible, what with Cookie digesting him right now. The Ouija board wouldn’t work since goldfish couldn’t talk; she was smart enough to know that he’d probably communicate with her through feelings or images. She didn’t have anything that was particularly special to him (She didn’t think the water in his bowl counted), so summoning him was out of the question. What she needed was a way to reach him indirectly.

Several hours and several dollars later, she had a bathtub full of fish purchased from the same store and the very same aquarium from which she’d purchased Bubbles. They weren’t exactly Bubble’s close relatives; they didn’t even look like goldfish, but they’d partaken of the same water, chewed on the same fake plants, and that made them close enough to suit her purposes.

For a while she tried using the bathtub as a scrying pool, but the fish kept swimming to the top and making the water ripple. She didn’t know the first thing about scrying anyway, so she wasn’t too disappointed when no visions appeared in the water. Next she leaned close to the water and whispered instructions to the fish for opening their minds and hearts to Bubbles so they could channel his spirit. After watching the fish swim around aimlessly for half an hour, she realized either they tried and failed to mediate for her, or they didn’t pay attention to her directions. Their failure convinced her she was going to have to do the job herself.

Talking to a fish was a delicate matter, she decided, made all the more so because fish couldn’t breathe out of water. Even though Bubbles was dead, his spirit would still be a fish spirit, so she’d need to communicate with him in a medium he could relate to. Shrugging off the jumper she was wearing, she gingerly stepped into the tub, careful not to offend its occupants, and sat down. She didn’t know how to find her way to Bubbles, but she knew of someone who did.

She’d learned in world history class that people put pennies on dead relatives’ eyes to pay Charon, the ferryman, to take them to the place where dead souls went. Even though she wasn’t exactly in a river, she was still in water, had gathered and lit all the candles she could find in the house, and sprayed some of her mom’s perfume around to act as incense. That should be enough to get his attention. She wasn’t dead, but she figured he’d probably charge her anyway, even if all she was going to do was visit for a short time.

Placing two pennies on her eyes (head side up for good luck), she submerged herself. With held breath, she waited.

The Grammar Errors That Surround Us: Rise Above Them

2012-04-03T18:08:00.001-05:00

Please forgive the poor quality of this photograph. When I entered the Home Depot bathroom and saw this sign posted on all the stall doors, I simply had to take a picture of it and the only camera at my disposal was the one on my cell phone.

Months ago I spotted this advertisement in the newspaper and set it aside as an excellent example of sentence fragments (not to mention lack of capitalization at the beginning of sentences):

Signs like these are why I empathize so much with students when grading papers. I just don’t have it in me to lecture students about how, as college students, they should know by now what a comma splice is. Not when signs like this one are posted in frequented public places, confusing and teaching incorrect grammar to people who are learning how to write.

Even if I can’t fault a student for reproducing the errors she sees everyday on billboards, signs, and flyers, that doesn’t mean I can allow it to continue. In a world of educated people who are all too willing to judge a person’s level of intelligence based on the writing she produces, it’s absolutely necessary to be ruthless with grammar instruction.

It is never easy to have errors in your writing pointed out to you, but it is vital if you are going to grow as a writer. Facing constructive criticism and the blow to your pride that comes with it builds character, too, and teaches you how to appropriately deal with feedback. Of course, someone (even if it’s it’s your internal monologue) has to be there to tell you to take it in stride, that the critique is nothing personal and you’ll be a better person for having experienced it.

If you’re someone who struggles with English, forgive yourself for making errors. After all, your eyes see conflicting reports every day over what is correct writing. But after you’ve made peace with your flaws, fix them; don’t let the mistakes people make become an excuse for you to be less than your full potential. You can be sure that society won’t be cutting you the same slack.

If, after you’ve gone back and read the post about comma splices and fragments, you still can’t find them in these two examples, send me an e-mail and I’ll be happy to point them out to you and explain why they’re grammatically incorrect.

So Much To Learn From Life

2012-03-19T19:01:00.001-05:00

After reading this comic in this week’s Sunday paper, I ran to get the scissors and laminating paper. If I still taught in a classroom, I’d have it posted on the door or loaded on the computer and projected on the overhead screen. The great thing about this comic is that is applies to more than just school.

Any person or situation that challenges you is bound to be present you with an experience from which you will learn. If you want to grow as a person, both emotionally and psychologically, actively seek out challenge. It may be rough while you’re going through the struggle, but afterwards you’ll be so glad you did.

The Dogs of Peru say “Guau”

2012-03-13T22:20:00.001-05:00

I love dogs. Really, I love animals of all kinds, but dogs have a special place in my heart. They love unconditionally and will go to extreme lengths for a simple pat on the head or “good boy.” No one else is as happy to see you again minutes after you just left the room, and no one else is so willing to do silly, embarrassingly ridiculous tricks for the simplest of treats.

During my trip, the dogs I came across helped alleviate the homesickness of knowing my own dogs were back home waiting and wondering where I was. If you’re accustomed to taking your dog to pet boutiques and dropping him off at doggie daycare every day, then seeing the day to day existence of dogs in Peru will break your heart. Even if you don’t pamper your dog excessively, you’re still in for a shock. The majority of dogs in Peru are “street dogs” and have no owner; those dogs that do have owners live no differently than the rest – they just struggle a little less to find food. Because all the dogs are full of dirt and fleas, no one pets them. People were shocked to hear we let our dogs sleep on the bed with us; they would have been floored to hear that our chihuahua squirrels his way under the covers to get comfy!

Thank you, Peruvian doggies, for making my week in Huancayo that much better. Your wagging tails and loving hearts will not be forgotten.

Dogs in the countryside weave through the crops like pros.

So many street dogs are just skin and bones. You could see packs of them tearing into garbage bags looking for food.

This dog lived on the roof! He ran fearlessly close to the edge and barked down at all the happenings on the street. He was a one-dog Neighborhood Watch!

I named this dog "El Negrito" and he was a regular visitor. He ate all the leftovers I gave him (but spit the fava beans right back out at me!). His owners "treated" his facial wound by boring a hole to let it drain. Doesn't he look like he's got places to go and people to see?

Even though this is an old photo, I wanted to end with a picture of my two babies at home. They're far from being little angels and drive me crazy when I'm trying to get work done, but I wouldn't change them for the world. These little guys make my house a home.

Anyone who's ever gone out of the way to help an animal in need, be it with a kind word or much more: Thank You! Believe me; they truly do appreciate it more than they can let you know.

The Linguistic Hegemony of English

2012-02-24T10:54:00.001-06:00

I recently returned from a short trip to Peru to visit my extended family. While Peru has much to offer in terms of tourist attractions, my visit only took me to Huancayo, the small mountain city where my grandfather lives. It’s been 15 years since the last time I stepped foot on Peruvian soil and what I saw surprised me.

English was everywhere.

While few people actually spoke it fluently, you could hear English words spoken in thick Spanish accents scattered liberally throughout conversations. English was even more prevalent in written form, covering billboards, merchandise, and even store names.

I was surprised because Peru is not bordered by any English speaking countries yet much of its attention is focused on what is occurring in English speaking countries, particularly the U.S. As far from the United States as the country is, news of Whitney Houston’s death made the front page of several local newspapers. Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s were two American fast food chains that had franchises even in the remote city of Hunacayo. Finding restaurants that served authentic Peruvian cuisine like pachamanca, cau-cau, or anticuchos was harder than it should have been when deep in the Andes mountains.

An English teacher at heart, I couldn’t help but notice and be touched by how many people wanted so desperately to learn how to speak English. From hastily scrawled graffiti on walls to native songs on the radio that inserted random words here and there, English was being used to the best of people’s abilities. I saw no less than 5 different advertisements for English classes. In a country where the faucets only have one setting – cold – because heating water costs too much, people don’t have disposable income. You can be sure anyone fortunate enough to be able to afford those classes is trying to squeeze as much out of them as possible.

Native speakers of English have no excuse for not being fluent.

If you live in an English speaking country, you are exposed to English from birth. You have been born into a life full of advantages others can only dream of. Not only do you receive schooling in English for 18 years of your life (not counting any post-secondary schooling you pursue), if you feel you are not being educated well enough by your school district you have the opportunity to search for help outside school or even teach yourself through books or the Internet. The desire to better yourself is all the motivation you need to get up and find resources available to you regardless of your socioeconomic status.

Unless your house is located on the side of a mountain and you have to hike up to it every day, you should have the time to devote to educating yourself. To do anything else is to squander the intelligence you’ve been given, not to mention the resources and opportunities other people can only dream of having.

Flash Fiction Friday: “Hidden Shadows”

2012-01-31T11:30:00.001-06:00

Groundhog’s Day is coming up! In celebration, Flash Fiction Friday’s prompt for this week asks for a story that takes place around February 2nd. Just to keep things interesting, it also must include the word “salad.”

I couldn’t wait to start writing because Groundhog’s day, with its theme of creatures hiding from shadows, fits in nicely with a story I’m already working on. In the scene I wrote, the tables are turned as it’s the shadow that is hiding from the “creature” looking for it.

I’ve managed to exceed the word limit yet again with this story. Only this time I’ve done so gloriously at a whopping 2,600 words. I just couldn’t bear to trim anything out of the scene I’d written. Hopefully you’ll love it every little bit as much as I do.

Prompt: This week’s challenge is to write a story that takes place on or around Feb. 2nd. Will it climax with a happy ending and the oncoming of spring or will it plunge into the bleak despair of six more weeks of winter?
Genre: Any
Word Limit: 1,500 words
Deadline: 2/1

Hidden Shadows

Patience wasn't usually one of Rosaline's virtues, but when there was something she wanted that required waiting, she somehow found the self-discipline she needed. Rosaline waited a week for the right time to search Katta's room to present itself. When it rained one day, she knew that time had come.

Putting on her boots, she went outside into the Inner Ward. She smiled when she saw the vegetable garden in all its muddy glory. Opening the gate, she stepped inside and plodded around, kicking up clods of dirt and tubers every which way.

When she was satisfied that her boots were covered in as much mud as they could hold, she exited the garden and made her way back towards the castle. Entering through the front hall, she stomped her way to the great hall, leaving a trail of muddy bootprints behind her. Once in the great hall, her lips curved into a smile as she looked down on the floor covering.

She renewed her stomping, vigorously working as much of the remaining mud into the intricately woven carpet as possible. When she ran out of mud on the bottom of her boots, she took them off and rubbed the mud off of the sides into the carpet. Once her boots were free of every trace of mud, Rosaline stepped back and admired her handiwork.

Satisfied, she replaced her boots and headed towards the kitchen. Following the sound of banging pans, she found Katta kneading dough and pulling baked loaves from the oven. Leaning on the counter, Rosaline started to pick at the loaves. Tearing chunks from the still very warm loaves, she stuffed them into her mouth until Katta swatted her away.

“Stop it! If you're going to eat, then take a loaf and be done with it. But don't just tear the tops off of all of them.”

Her mouth still full, Rosaline grunted something at Katta and walked away.

“What? I couldn't make out a single thing you said,” Katta said, irritated at Rosaline.

Swallowing the last of the bread, Rosaline turned partially towards Katta and said, “I just said that when you're done with cooking, you might want to clean up in the great hall. If you leave mud too long on carpet, it'll set, you know. And you wouldn't want that.”

Looking down at Rosaline's boots, Katta narrowed her eyes when she saw their pristine condition. Grinning over her shoulder at Katta, Rosaline sauntered out of the kitchen and towards the stairs.

Putting aside the dough she was working on, Katta went to investigate the great hall. She nearly slipped on a clod of mud she stepped on as she made her way to the large room. After regaining her balance, she looked down and her eyes widened at the trail she saw leading the way.

Rosaline laughed loudly when she heard Katta cursing her in the great hall, not caring whether she heard her. She waited for Katta to storm off towards the kitchen to get the cleaning supplies before doubling back down the stairs and dashing towards the servants' quarters. She had a good hour of uninterrupted time to look forward to alone in Katta's room before Katta would finish with her new chore.

Quickly locating Katta's room, Rosaline slipped into it without any trouble; none of the servants' doors had locks on them so her lack of experience with picking locks wasn't an obstacle to her curiosity. Once inside the room, she set to work looking for clues as to who or what Katta spoke to every night.

Compared to Rosaline's room, Katta's was spartan. She had no frilly curtains or bedspread, and no decorations of any kind anywhere in the room. Rosaline had discovered the first time she'd gone through the room months ago when she'd first arrived at the Castle on the Hill that Katta didn't keep anything in her room that didn't serve a utilitarian purpose.

Today she didn't bother with Katta's stash of plants on her desk. Rosaline considered them weeds and didn't know why Katta bothered with them anyway. Different combinations of ingredients did different things and having too much or too little of one plant could kill your or render the poultice ineffective. It was too much of a pain to worry about when it was easier to just not get hurt in the first place.

Heading straight for Katta's dresser, Rosaline started opening drawer after drawer and rummaging through her clothes. She didn't know what she was looking for (though she was hoping to find a diary or secret love letters), but the first place Rosaline would think to hide something would be underneath her clothing in the dresser. Finding a crude leather bag in Katta's shirt drawer, she pulled it out and upeneded its contents onto the floor.

River stones fell out and scattered across the floor of the bedroom. Rosaline picked one up and inspected it. Turning the stone over in her hand, she saw that on one side a symbol had been carved into the rock. Not recognizing the rune, she tossed the stone away and went back to searching the rest of the drawers. Finding nothing more, she turned her attention to Katta's nightstand.

Katta, unlike Rosaline, enjoyed reading and she had two books placed on her bedside table. Picking one up, Rosaline looked at the title and snorted. It read A Manéan Bestiary: Forest Creatures. She shook the book by its spine to see if anything fell out and was rewarded when a slip of paper fluttered to the ground.

Picking it up, Rosaline read the following lines written on it in Katta's meticulous handwriting:

You are silent like the oak

and just as strong.

You are not like other folk

and can do no wrong.

Giggling, Rosaline tucked it away in her dress pocket. It wasn't hard to figure out who Katta was writing about and having the poem would provide hours of entertainment once she figured out the best way to put it to use. Still, finding out that Katta harbored feelings for one of the brothers was no big find; Rosaline had been able to figure out as much just by watching Katta interact with them at mealtimes.

Rosaline hadn't gone through the trouble of getting Katta out of the way for an hour just to discover a crush she already knew about. She was here for bigger treasure; she was here for “Chicky.” Turning to the only piece of furniture left in the room to search, Rosaline set to work stripping the bed of its covers.

Leaving the sheets on the floor, Rosaline examined the bare mattress. She ran her hand between it and the frame all around the bed, but found nothing tucked away. Feeling the stuffing material shift as she pushed and prodded the mattress gave her an idea, though, and she went to Katta's desk in search of something sharp.

Lying on Katta's desk were a couple of implements that suited Rosaline's needs. One was a dagger, its wooden hilt worn and cracked with use and age. The other was a curved blade cast in the shape of a crescent moon. Its handle was made of bone, but was no less weathered than the dagger's. Both tools had been carefully set atop a folded scrap of silk cloth Katta had bought off a peddler years ago, and both had been polished to as brilliant a shine as their old blades would support.

Knowing nothing of athames or bolines (nor caring to know), Rosaline took one look at the dagger's keen edge and judged it suitable for the task at hand. Taking it back with her to the mattress, she started to cut into the mattress itself. Peashucks immediately started spilling out and Rosaline let them fall out onto the floor. Once enough of the stuffing had come out of the mattress to give her some room to stick her arm inside, she rummaged around in the remaining stuffing for anything Katta may have hidden inside her bed.

Rosaline wasn't surprised when she failed to find anything squirreled away inside the mattress. It had been a long shot to begin with that Katta would put something in such a difficult to reach location, but Rosaline was nothing if not thourough when searching for carefully guarded secrets. Back in Windhaven, she liked to think of herself as the next candidate for the King's elite troop of spies.

As persistent as she was when in search of another's secrets, she still disliked having to put too much effort into obtaining the information. Getting on her hands and knees and crawling under the bed was one activity that Rosaline considered “too much effort.” As such, she had put it off until the very end, hoping she would have found Katta's secret before the need to wiggle her way under Katta's bed presented itself.

Gathering up her skirt, Rosaline kicked away as much of the peashucks beneath her as she could before kneeling down next to the bed. She bent over first to see if she could see anything, but Katta's bed was pushed into the corner of the room, casting the area under the mattress in darkness. When Rosaline could make out nothing in the darkness, she groaned and reached under the bed as far as her arm would go, waving her hand back and forth to try and find something.

Something found her instead.

When Rosaline felt a sudden pain in her finger, she squealed “Ow!” and yanked her arm out from under the bed. Looking down at her hand, she could see blood start to well up out of a cut on the end of her index finger. Putting her finger into her mouth, she leaned back down and strained to see into the darkness under the bed.

The longer Rosaline stared, the more she thought she saw movement. It was difficult to make out a shape, because the different shades of darkness kept blending into each other, a kaleidoscope of shadows. Rosaline wasn't sure, but she had the distinct impression she was being watched by something in the darkness. At first, this made her uncomfortable, and she moved to get up. A faint noise made her stop, though. Straining to hear, it was difficult for her to make anything out beyond a very light tittering sound. Something about it reminded Rosaline of laughter, and in a second her unease turned to anger.

“You stupid mouse! Nothing bites me and gets away with it,” she said, getting up. Looking furiously around the room for something long, her eyes alit on a broom lying against Katta's desk. Katta had made it by hand out of an ash stave and willow twigs. If Rosaline had asked her, Katta might have told her that she called it a “besom.” Katta wasn't there to ask and Rosaline wouldn't have cared either way. Grabbing the broom with a triumphant grin, she returned to kneel by Katta's bed.

“I'll show you not to mess with me,” Rosaline growled as she plunged the broomstick into the darkness and waved it around. When she felt resistance and heard a startled squeak, she knew she'd hit something. She swung the stick back and forth, giggling when she heard the sound of frantic jumping as her target tried to get out of the way. All of a sudden, the stick stopped meeting resistance, smacking into the wall instead. Rosaline leaned over and stared into the darkness, listening intently for the sounds of movement. Before she had a chance to figure out where her target had gone, the shadows swirled around where she held the broomstick and a black beak darted out and cut a gash into the top of her hand.

With a yelp, Rosaline dropped the broom and clutched her hand to her chest. Scooting backwards as quickly as she could, she put as much distance as she could between herself and Katta's bed, only stopping when she bumped up against Katta's desk. Eyeing the darkness under the mattress warily, she reached up with her good hand and grabbed a strip of linen from off the desk.

Wrapping her hand, she glared at the bed and muttered “You're not a mouse; you're a rat! You can stay down there for all I care. I hope you have lots of babies in that mattress and you all bite Katta when she sleeps.” Getting up, Rosaline left the room with as much dignity as she could muster.

Hours later, a tired, dirty Katta returned to her room in search of a fresh change of clothing. Opening her door, she stopped at the scene before her. Her eyes took in every detail – the runes scattered across the floor, the opened drawers, the mattress – but she cared only about one thing. “Chicky?” she called out tentatively. When she received no response, a kernel of fear took root in her stomach and she called our more loudly, “Chicky!”

Her fear broke her paralysis and she started to search frantically through the sheets strewn on the floor. She had just finished pulling the drawers out of her wardrobe and pushing it away from the wall to search behind it when her gut told her her efforts were in vain. Chicky was probably gone. Rosaline had scared him away or he'd snuck out hidden in the folds of her dress. Who was she kidding? A closed door could never keep him contained if he wanted freedom.

Looking around, she sighed at the mess. Exhaustion overtook her and she sat down where she stood by her bed. She was still sitting there surrounded by peashucks when Jon found her half an hour later. Katta had heard him shouting her name down the hall, searching for her, but she lacked the interest to care. When he saw her open bedroom door, he ran in, livid about the state of the garden, only to stare in disbelief at her room.

His eyes met Katta's and his anger grew at the desolation he saw in them. “That girl... this is the last straw. No more. If she likes the garden so much, then she can eat nothing but salad for the next week. No, for the next month! Don't you go giving her anything either, Katta. Look at what she did to your room! She can't get away with this!”

When Katta looked away and chuckled at his pronouncement, Jon left in disgust. Deep down he knew what Katta's laugh had meant and he knew that she was right. There would be no punishment for Rosaline's mischief. As far as the Cauchemars were concerned, the girl had performed to expectations.

Katta sat in her pool of peashucks a while longer, feeling empty and alone. It wasn't in her nature to give up, however, and soon her fighting spirit stirred within her, spurring her out of her depression. She pushed her emotions away and set to work repairing her room. She was in the middle of sweeping all the spilled peashucks into a pile when she heard a chirping sound behind her.

Shrugging it off as her mind playing tricks on her, she kept sweeping. When the chirping became more insistent, she couldn't help but begin to hope. Stopping, she turned around slowly... and found nothing. Disappointed, she kicked herself for wishful thinking and turned back to her pile of peashucks. Just as she resumed her sweeping, a blackness jumped out from within the pile, spraying peashucks everywhere. Startled, Katta smacked it with her broom. The creature emitted a loud “CHEEP!” and flapped its wings in consternation.

With a gasp, Katta dropped the broom and sank to the floor. “Chicky!” Scooping him up in her hands, she hugged him to her chest and laughed. Setting him back down on the floor, she smiled and wiped tears from her eyes as Chicky bounced around happily. “You stayed.”

Photo credit: MikeArther

Value in the Old Things: Save Your Writing

2012-01-29T12:29:00.001-06:00

On my way to a bookstore yesterday, I walked by a furniture store and decided to take a look inside. The pieces it housed were almost all rustic, old, and handmade – furniture with a soul. Running my fingers along the intricate yet imperfect carvings of some of the works reminded me of just how much value we place on work that wasn’t made in a factory, especially if its aged. The imperfections lend a uniqueness that adds to the appeal.

The same love people have for their early attempts at crafting doesn’t seem to extend to their writing. Essays, once graded, get tossed in the trash and deleted from computers without a moment’s hesitation. While paper can pile up over time, there’s not need to delete computer files to make room on hard drives now that hard drives are standardly made with hundreds of gigabytes.

It took me years to realize the worth of my old writing and it wasn’t until graduate school that I started saving every essay I wrote. I did manage to find several undergraduate papers and even a few high school papers I’d stashed away and forgotten about and those are now some of my most prized possessions.

Revisiting your old writing is like opening up an old photo album and seeing pictures of yourself as you were in your youth. Your psychological state was frozen in that essay and you can see just how much you’ve grown as a writer and matured in your thinking by rereading it. When I reread essays, I’m overwhelmed by a sense of nostalgia. I see more than just the words on that paper; I’m taken back to my memories about writing the paper itself: the time I spent struggling to find research in the computer lab at school, the queso and chips I ate with friends during breaks who were also working on their own essays, my exact thoughts as I chose certain turns of phrase over others, and my feelings of disappointment or success as I turned my final draft in and waited for the grade. As juvenile as some of my essays seem to me now, I still feel pride at my accomplishment.

Apart from the immense sentimental value of essays, there are plenty of uses for them years down the line. They’re a wonderful way of connecting with your own children or nieces and nephews as they struggle to write essays in school. Even if you don’t plan on having children, there may come a time in your life when you will be mentoring a person (even an adult!) who will need to see examples of written work to understand how to put their own words down on paper.

If you plan on entering the teaching profession, it’s a given that you’ll want to save your old papers to use as models for your own students. Even if you don’t ever foresee yourself teaching, keep in mind that the job market is particularly rough now and you may end up standing in front of the classroom after all.

Most of all, old essays are like family heirlooms – they’re precious ways for the people you love to remember you. I know my own parents treated every essay I ever wrote as though it could win a Pulitzer Prize, no matter how quickly I’d written it the night before its due date. Who knows? You may just become famous one day and those old pieces of paper will be worth more than you could have ever imagined. Or you may decide to write an autobiography and include them, or use excerpts from your 13 year old self’s writing when you write a young adult novel. The possibilities are limitless when it comes to repurposing old writing.

Time passes so quickly when you get older; put that paper in a shoebox or binder and shove it into the back of your closet. Before you know it, you’ll be blowing 5 years worth of dust off the next time you clean out your wardrobe. If space is an issue, digitize. It takes no room at all, but make sure you bring your files along with you as the times change as I used floppy disks in high school and, unlike some gaming consoles, computers aren’t always backwards compatible.

Just like people get lucky on Antiques Roadshow, you may just end up desperately needing something you wrote long ago as a reference for a current project.

Photo source: Atalou

Why Spell Check Leaves Much to Be Desired

2012-01-02T11:27:00.001-06:00

There is a myth pervading America, sabotaging the efforts of students and professionals alike. That myth is the myth that spell check and grammar check work well. People everywhere are relying on them as their sole source of editing, much to the detriment of their writing.

To understand just why this dependence is more a hindrance than a help, let’s look at how spell checkers and grammar checkers work. This post will focus on spell check first because it’s more widely used than grammar check.

How Spell Check Works

Millions of people use their word processor’s built-in spell checker without knowing how it actually works. It’s certainly not necessary to know what is going on behind the scenes in order to make use of this tool, but it can help you make an educated decision about the suggestions it gives you.

Because spell check is more widely used than grammar check, we’ll start with it first. In simplest terms, spell check compares every word you type to a built-in dictionary; if it can’t find the word you type in its dictionary, it marks it incorrectly spelled (usually by underlining it in red). While it’s nice to know what words are misspelled, simply identifying them for you doesn’t necessarily help you figure out how to fix the error. At best, it means you have to pull out a dictionary yourself and search for the word. The problem with that is you have to know how a word is spelled before you can look it up in a dictionary!

Spell checkers therefore have a second built-in step; after they identify an incorrectly spelled word, they provide suggestions for the correct spelling. You simply scroll down the list of suggestions until you find the word you meant to type. Sounds helpful, right?

The main issue with spell check’s utility is the number of suggestions you receive. Not counting synonyms, only one word should fit in the place of the word you spelled incorrectly. How, then, is the computer generating a list of possible replacements? Doesn’t it know what you meant to write?

To understand spell check’s limitations a bit more, let’s break how it generates suggestions. After identifying the incorrectly spelled word, the spell checker needs to figure out how it’s been misspelled. To do that, it generates a list of words (both real and nonsense words) based on the different types of misspellings that can occur:

Deletion: a letter is missing (for example, “stacing” instead of “stacking”)
Insertion: there is an extra letter (for example, “eatting” instead of “eating”)
Substitution: one letter replaces another (for example, “thwee” instead of “three”)
Transposition: letters have switched places (for example, “teh” instead of “the”)

Here’s an example of a (very abridged) list of words a spell checker generates as it tries to figure out how you misspelled the word it’s trying to fix:

Misspelled Word:	siting (instead of "sitting")
Deletion:	saiting, sbiting, sciting, sditing, smiting, sitting
Insertion:	sting, siing, sitng, sitig, sitin
Substitution:	sating, siring, seting, sitang
Transposition:	isting, stiing, siitng, sitnig

From among the nonsense words generated, we have some real words that are not misspelled. Using percentages gleaned from extensive analysis of a corpus of documents, the spell checker next ranks these words according to how likely it is the error occurred. The final result is the list of suggestions the spell checker presents to you when you spell check your document.

The key idea to note here is that the spell checker does NOT know what word you meant to use. It’s not actually taking into account the meanings of the words and whether they fit into the context of the sentence. The spell checker also doesn’t know if you made more than one type of error (or more than one instance of one type of error) when spelling your word. While it will try to generate words based on more complex errors, it will rank more likely misspellings higher on the list, so the word you meant to type may be much farther down the list.

Why is this a limitation when it comes to spell checkers? We all know no one scrolls past the first few suggestions, if they bother to read the suggestions at all. Most people just hit “change” automatically. Because semantics aren’t integrated into the spell checker code, the words it suggests to you may not be the correct ones.

Without getting into grammar check territory, there are some errors that spell check cannot find. It can’t tell when you’ve used repetitions of a word incorrectly. For example, “I’m very very sorry” may be acceptable, but “I’m writing about about the author” isn’t. It also can’t check whether or not your main points are in order or even if “Firstly” comes before “Secondly” in your paper! And let’s not even go into homonyms….

Spell check is definitely better than not editing your paper at all, but ONLY if you read the suggestions before clicking “accept” on the suggested change. If you’re a non-native speaker of English, then you can still benefit from spell check without sacrificing accuracy; look up each of the suggested words in a dictionary until you find the word with the meaning that fits what you were trying to write. It will take more time, yes, but with repetition you will make fewer mistakes, learn more vocabulary, and even be able to spell better than many native English speakers!

If you’re interested in knowing the nitty gritty about how spell check is coded in a programming language, James Matthews wrote a great introduction called “How Does Spelling Check Work?” I should warn you, though, it’s very technical.

Examples of Spell Check Fail

Most people need to see something to believe it, especially when it comes to a tool many people wouldn’t be able to write a paper without. Here are examples of spell check failing in action:

Taylor Mali has a special place in my heart. He’s the kind of teacher I want my future children to have! Taylor Mali’s performance of his poem “The The Impotence of Proofreading” is classic and I have shown it to every high school and college class I could. He ran this poem through spell check and was told it was 100% correct. Be warned, though, that there are a few sexually suggestive moments in the poem, but nothing too explicit. If you haven’t seen his “What Do Teachers Make” video, it’s phenomenal!
Jerrold Zar’s poem “Candidate for a Pullet Surprise” is another poem that demonstrates just how wrong a spell check can be when it tells you your paper has no errors. This poem is a classic!
There’s an entire web site dedicated to the iPhone’s auto correct feature. Be warned, though, DamnYouAutoCorrect.com has many explicitly sexual entries.

Let the preceding links serve as cautionary tales for why it pays to be as smart as the tool you use. Just like math teachers won’t let students use a calculator before they know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide without it, you need to be able to spell before you rely on a spell check to catch errors for you. Spell check should be your last defense and the errors it catches should be careless ones on your part that you immediately recognize when it points them out.

But don’t just take MY word for it. Read Johanna Sorrentino’s article “Is Spell Check Creating a Generation of Dummies?” and Jill Baughman’s “25 Reasons Not to Trust Spell-Check When Job Hunting.”

Photo source: BureauCrash

Yuletide Wishes!

2011-12-12T10:44:00.001-06:00

Goodness, so much has happened this past month to keep me away from blogging! NaNoWriMo was a thrill to participate in for the first time. It was everything I thought it would be and more. The community of people involved (both locally and online) was so welcoming and enthusiastic, it really made you feel like you were part of something huge and significant. I will definitely be taking part in next year’s writing marathon. Thank you everyone who cheered me on.

I started a research assistant position midway through September and immediately had a very tight deadline to meet for a manuscript. Because of that I was unable to reach my 50k word goal for NaNoWriMo. I still feel like a winner, though, because I learned something so simple yet profound: I have time enough for anything if I choose to make the time for it. Although I couldn’t add 1,665 words to my story every day, I could and did add a paragraph here or a couple of sentences there every single day. I got more work done on my story this past month than I had all year. Before NaNoWriMo, if I didn’t have at least several hours free to work on my writing, I wouldn’t bother. I had a very “all or nothing” mentality about my writing. Now I know I can accomplish so much just by adding little pieces here and there. This experience has truly been a breakthrough for me as a writer.

I hope everyone gets a chance to go through an experience equally enlightening. Life really is about taking small steps towards your goal. It may take you a little longer, but you will get to where you want to go someday. If you take off sprinting towards your destination, you may end up burning out long before you near the finish line.

Here’s wishing everyone a wonderful holiday this winter season!

Photo: My sister’s dog Chuy is ready for Christmas! Are you?

Flash Fiction Friday: “Runes and Shadows”

2011-11-01T22:09:00.001-05:00

It’s a good thing I can’t get disqualified from Flash Fiction Friday for not following instructions. It turns out I’m quite bad at it! I’ve gone 250 words over the word limit again and failed to use two of the required words in my story. My writing always takes me where it will, though, and when it decides the rules are too confining and breaks loose, all I can do is hang on for dear life.

This story is actually part of a much larger story that I am currently working on for NaNoWriMo. It was rather fortuitous that this week’s prompt asked for a creepy story involving a castle when that’s exactly the genre and setting of the novel I’m working on.

There is quite a bit of back-story involved as this scene doesn’t happen until at least 2/3rds of the way into the story. Hopefully whatever isn’t clear will be intuitive enough not to hamper your understanding of the scene (and, with luck, give the story a nice air of mystery!). I have once again loosely interpreted the prompt to include the Outer Ward of the castle instead of the castle proper; the image above of Harlech Castle has an example of where the Outer Ward is located.

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Prompt: Write a spooky story about a night spent in a castle.
Use These Words: Drip, creak, shudder, ancestor, tapestry
Genre: Ghost Story/Suspense
Word Limit: 1,500 words

Runes and Shadows

The forest loomed before them, full of gnarled trees and shadows. The girls advanced on it, not bothering to hide as they walked across the grassy expanse that led to the forest's edge. The Cauchemars wouldn't return for another day, maybe more if Ron could drag out the journey like he promised. He'd tried to dissuade them at first, but when he saw that Katta and Lizbeth were set on entering the forest, he finally relented. He would delay the Cauchemars' return as long as possible, if only so he wouldn't have to be the one to find the girls' bodies.

As they walked, Lizbeth tried to make conversation with Katta. Despite the secrets the two now shared and the danger they faced together, it was difficult for Lizbeth to break through Katta's stand-offish exterior.

“What's a forest doing inside the castle walls? Aren't castles supposed to have stables and buildings inside its Outer Ward to house the villagers during times of war?”

“How many castles have you seen?” Katta snapped at Lizbeth.

Looking away, Lizbeth mumbled her answer.

Katta prodded the girl. “What? I didn't hear you. Speak up.”

“None, o.k.? This is my first.”

“Then stop acting like you know everything just because you read a lot.”

Lizbeth finished the rest of the walk in silence, wondering what she needed to do for Katta to like her better. For all she knew, this was how Katta treated her best friends.

As they reached the forest's edge, Lizbeth's foot caught on something and she fell hard. Leaning down, she saw that it was a stone. After she brushed off the dirt, she could see that there were markings on it that glinted in the midday sun.

“Hey, Katta, wait up! I found something.”

“Oh, you actually tripped on something? I just thought you were being clumsy again.”

Ignoring Katta's verbal jab, Lizbeth cleared off as much of the stone as she could for Katta to see. “Look, there are markings. What do you think they mean?”

“What makes you think I know? Just copy it into your notebook and we'll find out later when we check the library.”

Lizbeth pulled out her journal and copied the markings as accurately as she could. There were only three symbols on the stone, so she gave each its own page.

Katta wandered as she waited, kicking at the grass with impatience. It wasn't long before her foot hit more than just grass.

“Hey, I found another one. And I can see another stone even farther.”

Rosaline perked up, interested. “Do they have the same markings?”

“Well, this one does. I don't know about the one farther down.”

As they brushed off each stone, they found the same set of three markings. Each stone led them to another one and another one until they'd followed the line of stones all the way to where it joined with the outer wall.

“Look, Katta. More of these stones are embedded into the outer wall.”

“That's peachy, but how about we get back to doing what we came here to do? I want to meet them while the sun is still high in the sky.”

Lizbeth forced herself to push aside her curiosity about the stones and to follow Katta back to where she first tripped. The thought that somehow the markings on the stones were important nagged at the back of her mind, but she knew Katta wouldn't stop for more delays. Facing the trees, the two girls paused. To Lizbeth's surprise, Katta reached out and grabbed her hand. Without looking at her, she stepped forward and into the forest. Lizbeth followed a second later and gasped as she was swallowed by darkness.

Katta let go of her hand and Lizbeth was alone with the blackness. Just when she started to think Katta had abandoned her, she saw a flicker of light appear beside her. As her eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness, she saw that Katta had lit a candle and was holding it before her.

“I'm so glad you always have those on you,” she told Katta. “I didn't think it would be so dark this time of day.”

Shrugging, Katta walked deeper into the forest. “The trees are just dense here. Come on, there's a clearing up ahead where the Cauchemars leave the children. We can wait for the Shadow People there.”

Lizbeth struggled to keep from tripping over tree roots and fallen branches as she followed closely behind Katta. “How do you know about the clearing if you've never been in the forest before?”

Katta looked back at Lizbeth, the candle light framing her face in shadows. “When did I say I'd never been here before?”

Lizbeth shuddered and tore her eyes away from Katta's glare. Katta snorted and got back to finding a path through the forest. They walked together in silence for several minutes, the only sound the creaking of the trees as the girls pushed aside branches. When Katta started talking, she did so without stopping to look at Lizbeth.

“I followed Them in when they took Nora in here last year. I'd long since figured out what was happening - I mean, it's hard not to when you're told you have to write parents in their children's place because they're 'indisposed.' I just wanted to see it for myself.”

Silence followed Katta's words as Lizbeth waited for her to continue. Interrupting her now might break whatever mood had taken hold of Katta and Lizbeth desperately wanted to hear the rest of the story. Minutes passed this way before Katta picked up the thread of her story again.

“They led Nora to a clearing and waited. I didn't know what They were waiting for until I saw shadows start to separate from the trees and move into the clearing. The Cauchemars left her, then, and stood back, watching. There was something wrong with Nora, though. It wasn't like her not to put up a fight. The Nora of then just stood there and waited while the Shadow People fought over who got to eat her first.”

Lizbeth looked at Katta's back and wished she could see the expression on her face as she talked. Swallowing hard, Lizbeth ventured a question.

“Did they... was she...”

“Yes.” Katta said nothing more after that. The feeling that they were missing something obvious came back to Lizbeth and she pressed Katta for more answers.

“Why weren't you killed too? It was night time when you went in, wasn't it?”

“It was night, but I think the Shadow People feared the Cauchemars. I didn't stay much longer after they started... you know... so I was never here without Them.” Katta started to say something else but decided better of it, lapsing back into silence.

Lizbeth, emboldened by how voluble Katta had been so far, pushed for more. “What is it? It might be important.”

Katta sighed. Fighting her reticent nature, she said, “That's when I found Chicky.”

“What, here? By the edge?” asked Lizbeth.

“No... in the clearing.”

It took a moment for the implications of what Katta said to sink in, and when they did Lizbeth pulled back, aghast. “Oh my word! Chicky ate Nora?!”

“Not exactly. I mean, he tried. But he was attacked and knocked aside when he approached her body. I found him by the clearing's edge as I left. He was hurt badly and I just couldn't leave him.”

Lizbeth stopped walking and tugged on Katta's arm to get her to stop. “I don't know if we should be doing this anymore. I mean, we know Chicky and he still tried eat Nora. How can we trust the others not to kill us?”

Katta stopped and looked calmly at Lizbeth. “Even though the Shadow People are beasts, they still took turns with Nora's body. That means there must be a hierarchy they respect. We just have to find the leader and we'll be fine. Chicky forgot his place and got in trouble for it. Besides, he didn't know us back then.”

When Lizbeth continued to look unsure about proceeding, Katta snorted derisively at her. “This was your idea, remember? Didn't you say we needed to communicate with the Shadow People?”

“They're called the Darkin,” Lizbeth whispered.

“What?”

“The Darkin. You keep calling them the Shadow People but in the legends they're called the Darkin.”

Taking that to mean Lizbeth was back on track, Katta resumed her trek to the clearing. They didn't have far to go. Within minutes the two were standing in a circular clearing several acres wide. Light streamed down from the gap in the trees and dripped off leaves into darkness as it met the clearing's edge. Katta blew out her candle and she and Lizbeth walked to the center of the clearing, blinking furiously to help their eyes adjust to the brightness more quickly.

“How long do you think we'll have to wait?” asked Lizbeth.

In answer, Katta tilted her head towards the trees to the left side of the clearing. A cloaked figure was stepping into the light. As it approached them, it moved its head up, sniffing the air. Its hood fell back a little, letting the girls see the lower part of its face. It had thin lips that stretched taut over long, sharp teeth that angled out, barely contained by the thing's jaw.

Lizbeth screamed and stepped backwards. Whirling on her, Katta's rebuke died unspoken on her lips when she saw that other shadows were emergjng from the trees to stand around the clearing's edge. They were all shapes and sizes, human and animal forms, some more bestial than others. She turned back to the cloaked figure, now flanked by two smaller, no less grotesque, figures. Squaring her shoulders, Katta called out in as steady a voice as she could manage, “You can't do anything to us during the day. That's why we picked this time to come.”

The cloaked figure's shoulders started to shake, slowly at first, then more violently. Throwing its head back, it erupted into gravely, hoarse laughter. In barely intelligible English, it said “Silly girls. It's always night in here.”

While Katta stared at the Darkin, dumbfounded, Lizbeth started to groan beside her. “Oh no, the markings... Katta, the last one is a moon in all its phases. It means eternal night.”

NaNoWriMo 2011 Kickoff!

2011-11-01T10:52:00.001-05:00

This year I am finally going to be taking part in NaNoWriMo instead of just watching from the sidelines. For those who don’t know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. November of every year since the event began in 1999, tends of thousands of people around the world participate in writing a novel from start to finish within a time limit of 30 days.

An average novel has about 50,000 words so NaNoWriMo participants need to reach a daily word count of 1,666 to finish on time. Needless to say, I’m going to spend more time working on my novel than writing blog posts this month, so posts will be few and far between (if they happen at all).

I’m super excited about participating this year. I’ve been playing with an idea for a story for quite some time now and now I finally get to put it to paper and see what happens. Here’s a shout-out to all my students who kept telling me to stop talking about it and just participate already every time November rolled around and I spread the word about NaNoWriMo goodness :).

The Maturation Process

2011-10-27T10:37:00.001-05:00

I ran across this image a while back and it has stuck with me. I remember learning about the maturation process in my psychology classes and this image is dead-on. If I were still in the classroom, I’d blow it up and hang it on the wall. I’m glad age ranges weren’t added to the graphic as a person’s maturity level is a very subjective thing; I’ve known adults who refuse to accept responsibility for any of their actions and I’ve had the privilege of teaching some adolescents who were surprisingly wise for their tender age. Unfortunately, there seem to be more of the former than the latter.

Click here to go to the full size version. Thank you, VirusComix, for creating this graphic! The world would be a better place if more people understood the struggle towards self actualization.

Flash Fiction Friday: “Attack of the Cliche Circuit”

2011-10-19T18:42:00.001-05:00

This prompt for Flash Fiction Friday was one of the most difficult for me, especially since I used a very loose interpretation of what an antagonist is. I chose to write a science-fiction story and I never realized how much you have to keep track of: ranks, ship layouts, and command procedures (to name a few). I gave it my best shot and only went a couple hundred words over the word limit this time. Thanks for reading!

Prompt: This week’s prompt is to start with one conflict and reverse the polarity. Let’s see what happens when the tables are turned and your protagonists or antagonists are suddenly holding the fate of the other in their hands.
Genre: Any
Word Limit: 1,300 words
Deadline: 10/19 by 8:30 PM ET

Attack of the Cliche Circuit

Admiral Morgan awoke to blaring sirens and flashing lights. Still tugging on his uniform, he stumbled down the corridor towards the bridge. So intent was he on reaching the command room, he nearly ran into Lieutenant Gaffreys. He was standing in the middle of the hallway, staring out a side window into space.

“Gaffreys! Why are you just standing there?! This is a full emergency!”

“Oh, Admiral! I was on my way to the bridge when I looked out this porthole to see if I could glimpse the threat...”

Lieutenant Gaffrey's words trailed off as he started staring out the window once again. Morgan touched the lieutenant's shoulder to get his attention.

“Gaffreys?”

“My God... It's full of stars...”

Gaffreys' words startled Morgan because they were so strange. They teased at the corners of his memory, but the alarms were sounding and there was no time for remembering. Morgan left Gaffreys looking out the window and sprinted the rest of the way to the bridge.

Morgan entered the command room shouting. “I need a report of the situation!”

“We, uh, appear to be in the middle of a meteor shower, Admiral. It came out of nowhere!”

The Admiral turned towards the speaker in surprise.

“Ensign Creed? What are you doing manning the bridge? Where's the Vice Admiral?”

“She started feeling ill halfway through the second shift. She's in the med bay right now recovering, but before she retired she put me in charge while you slept.”

“Creed, you're the least qualified person on board to run this ship! Why would she choose....Oh my God.” The pieces started to fall into place in the Admiral's mind, his expression slowly changing from surprise to horror.

“Sir? I've actually got it under control. Even though the shields are offline, the navigation system is still running and our pilots are getting us through the shower.”

The Admiral shrugged him off and grabbed the intercom. He yelled into it, “I want all hands on deck who aren't otherwise engaged to find me Captain Logan. Make this your top priority!”

“What's so special about Captain Logan, Admiral?” Creed asked.

“He's BLACK!” the Admiral responded.

“That's not very racially sensitive, sir” piped up one navigator nervously. “He may be the only African American on board, but that's no reason to single him out.”

Before Morgan could reply, a second lieutenant came running into the command room, urgency apparent on her face. “Admiral! Sir, there's a problem with the AI!”

“Give me a report, Lieutenant Liu.”

“It started in the mess hall, sir. Second shift was trying to order rations from the Substance Processor when all the orders started coming out wrong. We tried getting through to the tech department through the comms, but no messages are getting through. Now the door access system is malfunctioning. We've got personnel trapped in rooms with no way out!”

The Admiral sat back, arms crossed as he contemplated these developments. Sitting up, he addressed the terminal in front of him. “Computer, find me the coordinates for the Gamma system.”

A mechanical voice responded with “I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.”

The crew looked at each other in confusion.

“Is your first name Dave, Admiral Morgan?”

Ignoring the question, Morgan switched off the terminal. Covering the intercom, he whispered to the navigators “Get the pilots on the manual navigation system.” Turning to Second Lieutenant Liu, he said “The AI's gone rogue. Quarantine it.”

Liu ran out of the bridge just as a group came in escorting Captain Morgan. He was out of breath, his red shirt showing sweat stains down his front and back. Seeing the Admiral, he broke away from his escort.

“Admiral! What's going on? I was on my daily run when the alarms suddenly started going off and then these guys came and told me you need to see me right away.”

Relief flooded Morgan's face as he grasped Logan's arms. “Thank God you're o.k., Captain!”

“Sir? What is goi-”

The Admiral cut off the Captain midsentence. “There's no time to explain, Logan. Creed!”

Ensign Creed appeared behind the Admiral's right shoulder and awaited his instructions.

“Creed, I want you to stay by Logan's side and never leave it for a second. We need him safe. Take a group with you. I want you all armed.”

Ensign Creed escorted a very confused Captain Logan out of the bridge. As they were leaving, the Admiral caught sight of Logan's shirt and yelled after them “And for the love of God, change Logan's shirt. Anything but red!”

“We're out of the meteor shower, Admiral,” the head pilot reported.

“Good. Stay on the manual drive and someone find me Lieutenant Liu. I need a report on the AI's status.”

Morgan sank into his chair, his hand covering the worried look on his face. “Please don't let this be what I think this is...” was all he said for several minutes. His other hand fingered a key he had hanging around his neck and the remaining crew looked at one another, no one wanting to disturb his contemplation.

Second Lieutenant Liu jogged in and broke the silence. “Sir? You wanted an update?”

The Admiral sat up, his face all business, and turned to face the second lieutenant. “Give your report, Liu.”

“Well, sir, we have the AI isolated in the mess hall. We managed to contain it in a toaster.”

“A toaster?”

“Yes, sir. It was the only piece of equipment not connected to the network. We felt it was safest.”

“As long as it worked. Jettison it into space; we'll install a new AI when we reach port.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Good work. You're dismissed, lieutenant.”

Just then Ensign Creed came running in, panic stricken and covered in blood, shouting “He's gone!”

The Admiral jumped up and steadied the shaking man. “Where's Logan, Creed? What happened?”

“We were in the laundry room getting a change of uniform when Captain Logan noticed how quiet it was. Usually you can hear all the machines going down there. Right after I said 'Too quiet' a monster reached down from the air shaft and took him. I tried to grab him, but...”

“Where was your armed escort?!”

“It was the laundry room, sir. We didn't think we needed them in there...” Creed started crying and wringing his hands.

“What did the monster look like, Creed? Did it have tentacles?”

“How did you know, sir?” Creed marveled. “Did you know it was on board?”

Morgan shook his head and paced the bridge, fingering his key again. Worry lines creased the Admiral's forehead. Stopping, he turned to a navigator and asked him to pull up the personnel files.

“What am I looking for, sir?”

“I want you to find me the woman on board with the biggest breasts. Once you identify her, send a dispatch to bring her here.”

A murmur started among the crew and someone piped up, “Just what is going on, Admiral?”

Admiral Morgan sighed and said, “We need Samson.”

The navigator cleared his throat, catching the Admiral's attention. “It's Lieutenant Sky, sir. She's already in here.”

Morgan immediately slipped the key off from around his neck and handed it to the lieutenant.

“Go to the last capsule in the Cryo chamber. Use this key to start Samson's rehydration process. When it is complete, bring him here. And hurry!”

Lieutenant Sky sprinted out of the room as quickly as her ample bosom would allow. Once she was on her way, Morgan turned to look at his bewildered crew.

“While we wait for Samson, let me explain what I know. They warned us about this in the academy, but I never thought I'd ever actually encounter one. What we are experiencing is a rare occurrence that has been documented no more than twice in the last 2000 years. It's called a 'Cliché Circuit.' Every ship carries a fail safe on board in case of it, but it's more a precaution than anything. That fail safe is called Samson.”

The bridge erupted into anxious conversation as the crew internalized the Admiral's announcement. As time passed and the group quieted down, noises could be heard coming from the supply closet.

“Sir, there's something in the closet. Should we-”

“No! Do NOT open that door! Logan's gone so any one of us could be next!”

The scratching noises got louder, and the crew huddled together around the room, waiting. After half an hour, Lieutenant Sky returned, holding a wiggling puppy in her arms. The more she attempted to keep it from licking her face, the harder it tried, its tail knocking against desktops and chairs as it wagged wildly.

The Admiral sighed in relief and took the puppy from Sky. Patting him on the head, he turned to his crew and said, “Samson's here. Everything's going to be alright.”

Photo credit: Sweetie 187

Flash Fiction Friday: “Birthright”

2011-10-11T20:15:00.001-05:00

Flash Fiction Friday has come up with another prompt for this week and I’m as excited about this short story as I was about the last prompt I participated in. I still have trouble sticking to the word limit (I’m 300 words over after extensive editing), but I can feel myself improving with each story I write.

Here’s the story and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Prompt: A car pulls up to a lake with two occupants inside. Explain why they are there and who they are.
Genre: Any
Word Limit: 750 words
Deadline: 10/12 by 9:00 P.M. EST

Birthright

Jeff turned the Mercedes sharply off of the trail he was following, showering the roadside with dirt and rocks as he slammed the car into park. Looking at the wide expanse of lake in front of him, he let out a cheer and gave his passenger a light punch in the arm.

“Woo! Here we are! I told you I wasn't lost.”

“Are you sure all these rocks won't hurt the rental? It's a really nice car. Maybe we should've gone with the Jeep.”

“C'mon, Drew, live a little! My 'rents got it all covered.”

“Yeah, I'm just not used to stuff this fancy. Not everyone's as well off as you are, you know.”

Jeff and Drew got out of the car and headed down towards the lake's edge. Jeff fiddled with a camera case while Drew stopped to look for smooth, flat stones he could use to skip across the lake's surface.

“O.k., I got the camera ready. Let's go face your destiny, Your Highness.”

“Will you cut it out with the 'Your Majesty' stuff? I never should've told you about that.”

“About what? The fact you could potentially be related to King Arthur himself? You'd really keep a secret like that from your best friend? We practically grew up together. We're bosom buddies!”

“It's just a silly story my mom told me when I was growing up. It's not like I have any proof or anything.”

Jeff spotted an outcropping of large rocks at the lake's edge and rushed over to it. “C'mon. Stop lagging behind and get your royal butt over here. This rock is perfect for your big scene!”

“You know this is retarded, right? You've had some stupid ideas but this one really takes the cake.”

“Stop whining and get over here. This is gonna be awesome! O.k., so you're gonna lift your arms up and say something ancient sounding like 'Cometh fortheth, Excalibur, my swordeth!' I'm gonna get it all on tape. Once I add the special effects and stuff on the comp and upload this to YouTube, do you know the number of hits we're gonna get?!”

Drew shot Jeff a look that made it clear Jeff had lost him again. “How is me waving my arms around and acting like a doofus going to get us hits?”

“Did you forget where we are?! We're in England, dude, and this is THE lake where Arthur threw his sword before he died.”

“It was Girflet. Arthur ordered Girflet to throw Excalibur into the lake. Although Malory's version says it was Sir Bedivere who threw it in.”

“Yeah, that's what I said. Anyway, the point is, you owe it to your heritage to try and call the sword from the lake. So what d'ya say?”

Drew gritted his teeth and kicked at the ground. “Will you get off my back if I do it?”

Jeff whooped and slapped Drew on the back as he led him to the rock outcropping. “I'll do you one better! I promise to stick to the tour schedule for the rest of the trip and stop busting your balls if you do this, alright?”

Drew rolled his eyes and slapped away Jeff's Boy Scout salute. “Let's get this over with, then.”

Jeff grinned and bounded away to get a better shot of the scene. When he was in position he shouted “Action!”

Drew rolled his eyes again and raised his arms. After a few seconds of thinking, he yelled “Come forth, Lady of the Lake! I am here to claim my birthright, Excalibur!” He kept his arms raised for a few more seconds, then turned to Jeff. “Good enough?”

“Yeah, man, that was good, but can you did it one more time with more feeling?”

“More feeling? How am I supposed to feel more retarded than I already do?!”

The boys' argument was cut short by a whooshing sound coming from the center of the lake. To their surprise, a geyser appeared. When it cleared, it left in its place what appeared to be a hand holding a sword straight up.

Drew was the first to speak after the sight. Turning to Jeff, he demanded “Did you do this?”

“How can I rig a lake?!”

“So you're really not just screwing with me? Just tell me if you are, o.k.?”

“Whatever that thing is out there, I didn't put it there, o.k? Why don't you get out there and see what it is?”

“How?! It's not like we have a boat. You want me to swim? You know the kinds of things that live in lakes? I don't want some worm swimming up my dick!”

Jeff pointed to Drew's pockets and said “Didn't you pick up some rocks earlier? Throw 'em at it and see what happens.”

Lacking a better plan, the two turned back to the lake. By then, the hand and sword were gone.

“Um...Jeff? I did what you wanted. Let's just get the hell outta here, k?”

“But we saw something! There was something out there, dude!”

“Look, you probably got it on tape, right? Let's get back to the hotel and look at it on the computer. I'm sure it'll turn out to be nothing.”

Defeated, Jeff turned to walk back to the car and came face to face with a woman. She was wearing a long white dress that had detailed gold embroidery on the sleeves and skirt hem. Any other details, including the woman's face, were hidden behind a mess of long, wet blonde hair. In one hand she held a sword, the tip trailing on the ground.

“Oh shit! It's that dead girl from The Ring! Drew, run!!”

Jeff sprinted over to the car but before Drew could make it, the Lady moved to block him with the sword. He stood in front of her, his hands palm up to his sides to show he meant her no harm.

“Are you o.k., m'am? Do you need something? We're just tourists but-”

Before Drew could finish the Lady brandished the sword in front of her, the tip now pointing to the sky.

Jeff shouted to Drew from where he crouched behind the car. “Don't worry, dude! I'm calling 911 on her dead ass!”

“It's 999 here, you idiot!”

Taking advantage of the opening Drew's distraction afforded, the Lady ran the sword through his chest.

“Oh shit! She got you! Shit!” Jeff cursed and hunted around in the back of the car for something he could use as a weapon. Seizing the tire iron, he rushed out to help his friend. He'd only taken several steps towards the Lady when a blinding light erupted from Drew's chest. Dropping the tire iron, Jeff fell to his knees and covered his eyes. When he opened them, Drew and the woman were gone.

Photo credit: Nickel Media

“Talker’s Block” by Seth Godin

2011-10-10T16:45:00.001-05:00

I enjoy reading Seth Godin’s blog because of how concisely he articulates everyday truths that we all know, but few of us practice. His posts are little nuggets of wisdom that seem so obvious only after reading them. His recent post titled “Talker’s Bock” is a new favorite of mine. I particularly enjoy the introduction:

No one ever gets talker's block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.

Why then, is writer's block endemic?

Please visit Seth Godin’s blog to read the rest of the post “Talker’s Block.” It will make you question just how common common sense really is with its straightforward, to-the-point advice on how to improve as a writer.

Photo credit: Rodrigo Muniz

Restrictive and Nonrestrictive clauses

2011-10-04T11:28:00.001-05:00

If commas were edible, no one need ever go hungry. You don’t necessarily see them everywhere in professional writing, but trust me when I say that less seasoned writers’ writing is teeming with commas. People feel an overwhelming need to stick them anywhere and everywhere when writing without really knowing why.

Let’s look at restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, for example. One comma is all that distinguishes a restrictive from a nonrestrictive clause and you could potentially be signaling to your reader that you want your clause to be restrictive when you actually don’t, and vice versa.

Also called essential and nonessential clauses, they indicate to your reader what information in your sentence is vital to its meaning and what information is just extra, and can be ignored. To understand why correctly punctuating these clauses is important in your writing, think about taking notes at school or at a meeting. A competent note-taker knows not to transcribe every word that comes out of the speaker’s mouth. As entertaining as any tangents may be, only the most important information gets written down and studied. This editing of unimportant information keeps us sane; it’s simply impossible to commit everything to memory.

Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Clauses

A restrictive clause modifies a noun in a sentence and indicates that the information it contains is vital to the meaning of the sentence. It is not set off by commas. Here’s an example to help make this idea clearer:

The cat that has a crooked tail would rather play with rats than eat them.

The clause “that has a crooked tail” lets us know which cat out of all the possible cats in this world is the one that refuses to hunt rats. If you put commas around the clause, you make it nonrestrictive and dispensable. I like to use my thumb to cover the clause and see if the sentence retains its original meaning without it.

This next sentence has another restrictive clause. Try covering it up and seeing if the sentence still makes sense without it.

Alanis Morissette’s hit album Jagged Little Pill won a Grammy.

I’m calling the phrase “Jagged Little Pill” a restrictive clause because it limits the meaning of “hit album.” Students tend to want to put commas around titles without realizing that that makes them nonessential to the sentence. Without the title, you have no idea which album won a Grammy.

If we add some more identifying information, then enclosing the title in commas and thus making it nonrestrictive is perfectly acceptable.

Alanis Morissette’s hit album, Jagged Little Pill, won a Grammy in 1996.

Since Jagged Little Pill was the only one of Alanis Morissette’s albums to receive a Grammy that year, removing the title from the sentence now does not destroy the meaning. Now it’s time to look at nonrestrictive clauses.

A nonrestrictive clause also modifies a noun in a sentence and indicates that the information it contains is not essential to the meaning of the sentence. It is set off by commas. The following sentence contains a nonrestrictive clause:

Management rewarded the employees, who received bonuses.

This sentence has the nonrestrictive clause “who received bonuses.” It is nonrestrictive because it is set off by a comma. The sentence therefore means that ALL employees were rewarded.

If the comma were removed, the sentence would look like this:

Management rewarded the employees who received bonuses.

Without the comma the clause becomes restrictive. The meaning of the sentence changes as a result and now means that ONLY employees who received a bonus will be rewarded.

Further Practice

The difference between a restrictive and nonrestrictive clause is a difficult one for many people to grasp and only a good deal of practice will tighten your grasp on when to employ commas.

ChompChomp has a great explanation of essential and nonessential clauses that includes many more examples.

The Law Student’s Guide to Good Writing by Professor Grinker also contains a very thorough explanation of restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses.

I’ll keep updating this post with more examples of correct and incorrect usage as I see them in student papers. In time, I’d like to create worksheets to help with this grammar issue as there is a lack of practice for essential and nonessential clauses online.

Hope this helps your writing and keep practicing!

Photo credit: Cmurtaugh

Flash Fiction Friday: “The Currency of Death”

2011-09-27T20:10:00.000-05:00

Yes, I know it’s Tuesday today, not Friday. I’ve been following the blog Flash Fiction Friday for the last several weeks and I’m excited that I finally had enough free time this week to participate. Flash Fiction Friday is a community writing project that invites people to write a short story every week based on that week’s prompt. The entry has to conform to any specific requirements mentioned and be posted by Wednesday.

I told a friend I was writing a story for this week’s prompt and he said “What do you get if you win?” It took me a few minutes to realize he thought the entry was for a contest that awarded a prize for the best story. It took me a while to explain that the story IS the reward.

I don’t expect to be able to participate every week, but I will try to take part as often as I can. It thrills me to no end to know there are other people out there writing stories simply for the joy of writing.

So, without further ado, here’s this week’s entry!

Prompt: Use the starter sentence “You know Javier, poets say that in the spring a young man’s thoughts turn to love, but I think they’re wrong.”
Genre: Any
Word Limit: 1,000 words
Deadline: 9/28 at 8:30 EST

The Currency of Death

“You know, Javier, poets say that in the spring a young man’s thoughts turn to love, but I think they’re wrong.”

“How many times do I have to tell you, mister? My name ain't Javier. I'm not even Hispanic!”

“No, it's not love his mind turns to when the flowers bloom. It's something far more sinister, more base. Wouldn't you agree, Javier?”

“Fine. You know what? Call me Javier all you want. I don't care. I just need to know where you wanna go, k? Where do you want me to drive ya?”

“A young man's desires drive his mind, take him where they will, but never more than in the beginning of the new year. Life springs up all around him, suffocating him with its vitality. Do you know what young men do when faced with such vigor?”

“Look, I don't really care, mister.”

“Oh, but you should care, Javier. You are a young man, are you not? It is of you I speak!”

“You know I'm just driving around aimlessly, right? The meter's runnin' and it's on your dime. So do ya wanna tell me where to go or not?”

For the first time since entering the cab, the old man sat silently. He sighed in resignation. “I've been telling you, Javi. My stop is here, but yours will never come. Not until you've sated your primal nature, rent the blooms from their stalks, and crushed Imbolc beneath your heel.”

“Here? Like, right here? You know there ain't nothing but vacant buildings in this part 'o town. You're gonna get yourself mugged getting out here.”

The man waited for the cab to come to a full stop before stepping out into the street. Holding the door open, he looked back at the cabbie. “Heed my words, Javier. I was a young man once, too, and I see that darkness in every shrug of your shoulder, every turn of your head.”

“Geez Louise! I'm getting sick of your bullshit, mister. You gonna pay me or what?”

The old man dug in his coat pocket for a minute before pulling and tossing a coin onto the driver's side seat. The cabbie reached over and grabbed it. “A quarter? Your fare's more than a lousy qua- JESUS!” The coin burned the skin off the cabbie's fingers where he had touched it, filling the air with the smell of charred flesh.

“That hurt, you friggin'- Hey! Where'd you go?!”

The cab door still stood open but the sidewalk was empty. Muttering under his breath, the cabbie got a roll of paper towels out of the trunk, wrapped his hand with it, and kicked the back door shut as he walked back to his seat.

“Crazy 'ol loon. Last time I'm pickin' up anyone from Montrose.”

The cabbie drove down several streets to the nearest coffee shop. A waitress looked up from refilling a truck driver's coffee mug when she heard the jingle of the front door opening. “Hey, darlin'. Be with you in a minute.”

“Take your time, miss. I'm in no hurry,” was the cabbie's response as he leaned against the front bar and waited his turn. Halfway through looking at the menu, he felt a hand on his left shoulder. He turned to see a man staring at him intently.

Letting go of his shoulder, the stranger said, “Xavier? Isn't it pretty early for you to be out? It looks like you forgot your 'tools', too. I didn't think you ever left your house without them.”

“Look, my name ain't X-whatever; It's Ray. I don't usually drive this far into town, mister, so I guarantee ya you got the wrong guy.”

The stranger looked puzzled a moment, then his face cracked open into a big smile. “You're kidding, right? Man, it's so not like you to josh around! You drink something weird or somethin'?”

Ray's right hand balled into a fist, further saturating the paper towels wrapped around his fingers with blood. “I ain't joking around, mister. I'm not this X guy and I'm not in any mood to play games right now.”

The stranger's smile faltered and, after a few moments, died entirely. “It's been a while since you've done this. Look, I'm not playing around. I've been waiting for you all afternoon.”

“You were waiting for me?”

The stranger ran his fingers through his hair and sighed loudly. “Man, I hate when you space out like this.” Grabbing Ray's arm, he led him to a back table and they sat down. “I'm Tom. You're Xavier. We're exorcists. Got that? Here, I'm supposed to give you this. Monseigneur entrusted me to give you this if he should ever pass away. Well, guess what, our friend the Bishop has died a most unnatural death and I'm complying with his last wishes.”

Tom pushed a leather wrapped package towards Ray, who pushed it right back at him.

“Whoa. Just...whoa. You're a what? No way. This ain't happening. Whoever you think I am, I'm NOT. This is crazy. I'm getting outta here.”

Tom pulled the string on the package and it fell open, its contents spilling onto the table before the cabbie could get up.

“He left this for you. Not me, YOU. It's really important that you take it, o.k.? God! Today of all days, why can't you be acting friggin' normal?”

Ray didn't respond to Tom's outburst because his eyes were riveted to a silver hand-mirror that had spilled out in front of him. Looking into it, he saw two other faces superimposed over his own. They were all him, but not him. The bone structure was the same for each face, as was the hair and eyes. But the similarities ended there. The longer he stared into the glass, the clearer the faces become, until they started separating, one from the other. Ray felt a burning begin in his chest then, and it spread across his body and intensified with every second his eyes remained glued to the mirror. Only ten seconds had passed before Ray was in agony.

“Hey, you o.k., man? You don't look too goo- Holy shnikey!” Tom reached out and tried to move the mirror, but it was riveted to its spot on the table. Thinking quickly, he grabbed the leather wrappings it came in and threw it over the mirror, breaking its connection with the cabbie.

“You o.k., man? Sorry about that. I should have known the Monseigneur would leave you something powerful. The runes carved on these wrappings should have been a give-a-way, but I didn't want to go through the package's contents without you.”

Ray sat dazed. “What was I looking at? What were those faces? And why do I hurt so bad?”

Before Tom could answer, a bestial shriek cut through the coffee shop, coming from all directions at once. Patrons were pointing to a spot on the far wall that was darker than the surrounding shadows. The spot grew steadily until it engulfed an entire wall. It moved towards the nearest table and that's when the screaming began. People sat paralyzed as they were ripped limb from limb, the shadow beast stopping only to shake more cries from its dying victims.

As fast as he could, Tom bundled up the items on the table back into a package and shoved it at the cabbie. “Get outta here, NOW!”

“What the hell is going on?!”

“Go, just GO! You don't have your tools on you! I'll deal, so go!”

His confusion mingling with fear, Ray ran to his cab, looking back once to see Tom grappling with a shadow. Claws tore at Tom's abdomen and Ray turned away just as Tom's innards spilled onto the floor.

“Ohmygod. Ohmygod. Ohmygod. This isn't happening.” Ray's hands shook as he turned the key in the ignition. The car sputtered and stalled.

“Oh no. Not today, not now. Please, baby. Work for daddy. Come on, come on...”

The engine revved so quickly that the car jumped forward, jostling everything in the cab. Ray pushed the car into drive and slammed his foot down on the gas. The contents of the cab shifted again as it sped off, causing a quarter-sized coin to slip unseen under the floor mat. Glancing up at the rear-view mirror, Ray saw the coffee shop disappear as it was engulfed in darkness.

Photo credit: JCarlosN

Do Not Flush!!! Grammar Issues in the Bathroom

2011-09-21T13:29:00.001-05:00

While at the Town & Country HCC campus, I was in a hurry to use the restroom during a quick break between teaching classes. I rushed into the nearest open stall, did my business, and was just about to flush the toilet and step out when I was confronted by this sign on the wall:

DO NOT FLUSH!!!
feminine napkins or tampons

I immediately pulled my hand back, grabbed my purse, and started to leave the stall before I thought to myself “Wait a minute….that’s gross!” After rereading the sign, I realized what I had missed during my initial glance, but it made me wonder just how many people had left without stopping to question their first reading of the sign. On top of that, the sign was posted on all 4 walls of each stall and every 2 feet along the sink mirror. It made me think something truly horrible must have happened the last time someone flushed a pad down the toilet, something along the lines of Godzilla.

I’d hate to have been on the janitorial staff servicing that bathroom. Forget having to clean the space, just having to use the facilities could be distasteful if I’d been to a stall that someone else had previously used. Whoever made that sign was responsible for creating the mess.

In case you’re still confused about why this sign led to miscommunication, there are two problems with it. First of all, the font size used for the directive “DO NOT FLUSH” dwarfs the rest of the message, capturing readers’ attention and blocking or hiding the much smaller words. Secondly, the exclamation points that follow the command stop the reader’s brain from processing the rest of the message because exclamation points indicate the end of a statement by taking the place of periods in exclamatory sentences.

I love using this anecdote to illustrate to students the need for attention to grammar. If they were janitors trying to make their work easier by putting up signs for customers, they could potentially be complicating their lives if their signs were badly constructed. Most students laugh and say they won’t be house-cleaners when they graduate, and I make sure to tell them that I would hope not. I want them to aspire for more in their lives! Not that there’s anything shameful about being a custodian; I’d challenge anyone to trade places with a stay-at-home mother or manual laborer and not end up exhausted after a hard day’s work. Manual labor jobs don’t usually provide living wages, though, and I want better for my students than living paycheck to paycheck.

What I hear quite a bit from students is that they will have jobs where they won’t need to write. People on the lower rungs, like secretaries or assistants, do all the writing, but not nurses/engineers/<insert the career they’re studying for>. It comes as a shock for many to hear that my mom writes e-mails to other nurses and managers on an almost daily basis, in addition to the notes she has to make on patient charts and signs she posts around the unit. My father was a civil engineer and he churned out proposals, memos, project reports, and letters around the clock. There are no “assistants” who do all the writing for the professionals; it saves companies so much money to hire professionals who can do their own writing that it has now become a requirement for succeeding in the work force.

I’m off to visit family in San Antonio! Happy writing ‘till I get back!

Photo credit: Mirjam van den Berg

Word Mix-ups: Less vs. Fewer

2011-09-16T19:37:00.001-05:00

While watching television the other night, I was taken aback when I saw this commercial:

The commercial was going so well until the ending when these words are read: "More power. More style. More technology. Less doors" (emphasis added). Less doors?! It's fewer doors.

Not everyone is a grammar guru and remembering which word is appropriate in certain contexts can trip many people up, especially if they or their family members are non-native speakers of English. But the people who created this commercial should have known better. This mistake should have been caught somewhere in the editing process before it made it to production. Was no one on that advertising team a native English speaker who passed high school English?

I am by no means a prescriptivist when it comes to grammar, but you have to keep in mind who Mercedes’ target audience is. Mercedes-Benz is a luxury vehicle that wealthy, well-educated people purchase. Their clientele probably knows what the subjunctive case is and uses it regularly. Mercedes is a company that should be able to afford the best talent to create its ads and for there to be such a blatant grammar error in a commercial is, quit frankly, embarrassing.

So that you can avoid making the same embarrassing mistake as the Mercedes ad team, here’s a quick guide on how you can remember when to use the word “less” or the word “fewer.”

Less = Non-Count Nouns

If you cannot count the noun you are referring to, then you use the word “less.” Examples of non-count nouns are: electricity, humidity, weight, salt, air, and water. You cannot say “I have one electricity,” or “”I have three humidity” because the noun refers to the phenomenon as a whole.

For non-count nouns, you will use “less.” So, “Toasters need less electricity than televisions” and “Dallas has less humidity than Houston.”

The moment you add a quantity indicator in front of the non-count noun, your adjective (“less”) is no longer modifying the non-count noun; instead, it is modifying the new count noun you introduced and needs to be changed to “fewer.”

Examples of quantity indicators are: loaves of bread, kilowatts of electricity, pints of water, puffs of smoke.

Fewer = Count Nouns

If you can count the noun you are referring to, then you use the word “fewer.” Examples of count nouns are: door(s), animal(s), book(s), television(s), and spoon(s). Since you can say “I have one door,” or “John has two spoons,” fewer is the appropriate adjective to use.

So, “This car now has fewer doors” and “After two cats ran away, Jenny has fewer pets” are acceptable ways of indicating a decrease in quantity. The same applies when referring to non-count nouns that have a quantity indicator preceding them. So, “I baked fewer loaves of bread” (NOT “I baked fewer bread”).

If you have difficulty differentiating between count and non-count nouns, spend some time looking up lists online, print them out, and keep them handy until you are familiar enough with the words that you no longer need the lists. Most dictionaries don’t include a count/non-count noun indicator in the word entry, so it’s up to you to create a list for yourself. Some dictionaries will include a list of common count and non-count nouns in the back, so be sure to check yours.

Think-Behave-Speak-Write.com has a very handy mnemonic for remembering what words are non-count nouns. You can check it out here.

Purdue’s Online Writing Lab also provides easy to use tests for determining if the noun you have is a count or a non-count one. You can check them out here.

Good luck with your less and fewer usage, and make sure you edit your work more carefully than the Mercedes advertising team did!

Photo credit: Hooverine

Review of The Maze Runner

2011-09-13T13:26:00.001-05:00

I purchased The Maze Runner by James Dashner because it is a young adult novel and I wanted to provide a wide range of reading material for my students. The beautiful cover art captured my attention and the dust jacket’s promise of a story full of mysterious characters, a dangerous setting, and an interesting story cinched the deal.

The Maze Runner is a story that centers around one boy’s struggle to survive in the strange, lethal maze he’s been dropped into while simultaneously trying to unlock sealed away memories that hold the key to his identity and, ultimately, the solution to escaping the maze alive. To further complicate matters, he’s not alone.

Tom, the main character of our story, begins his adventure by waking up alone and afraid in a metal box that is steadily rising. Once his upward journey comes to an end, the box is opened and he is in an open glade, surrounded by dozens of other boys, most of who treat him with disdain as the “greenbean” who knows nothing about surviving in the Maze or the society the Gladers have painstakingly created over the years. It’s up to Tom to learn the rules as quickly as possible and solve the maze before time runs out for all of them.

If you don’t want to see any plot spoilers, you should stop reading now. The remainder of this review will take apart what made this book successful as well as point out some problematic areas in the writing.

The Good Stuff

Technically, the dust cover isn’t part of the novel itself, but I have to take a moment to give props to Philip Straub, the creator of the jacket art. The snapshot of the maze that the art provides is beautifully mysterious. Vines cover giant metal walls in a carpet of greens and browns while rusted spikes stand menacingly in the foreground, threatening to slam the door shut on our stolen glimpse of the mysteries the maze offers. The lushness of the cover art mirrors the beautiful description in the book.

Creating a setting that entices a reader’s imagination and is vivid enough to make the world come alive is crucial for any book that relies on the setting to carry part of the story. It’s easy to see Dashner has accomplished this; sentences like “Glimmers of an eerie light shone through the window; it cast a wavering spectrum of colors on Newt’s body and face, as if he stood next to a lighted swimming pool” provide a clear, somewhat poetic image of what Tom is seeing without bogging the writing down with too much description. Despite having to describe a completely new environment for the reader, Dashner manages to keep the pace of the story quick. I wouldn’t have minded longer descriptions, but Dashner is doing what good authors do and keeping his target audience in mind. As an adult reader, I hardly notice the shallow (but beautiful!) description because Dashner immediately gives me something else with which to occupy my mind.

The Gladers have created their own vocabulary. “Klunk,” “shank,” “slopper,” and “shuck” are just a few of the nouns, adjectives, and verbs the boys have come up with to describe their world.The effect of having all of these neologisms thrown at you from the moment the box is first opened is that you are just as bewildered as Tom is when he first meets his new companions. You feel Tom’s confusion, share his anxiety. Dashner very adeptly shows you Tom’s emotions instead of telling you about them.

The linguistic creativity in the novel also serves other purposes. For one, young boys really do come up with epithets for each other. The Gladers are acting and speaking like the youngsters they are, lending an air of believability to the characters. Not only that, but they’re actually cussing at one another and calling each other rather derogatory names without using socially inappropriate terms. Young adults can read this book without their parents getting offended that the characters are calling each other “shit-heads” every other page. The neologisms give the story an air of mystery and novelty that the setting requires, as well as keep the reader engaged in trying to figure out what the words mean.

Dashner hit a home run by introducing these terms into the book. They, combined with the believable characters, rich setting, and fast paced plot, make this book quite enjoyable.

Problematic Areas

As good as this book is, there are a couple of problem areas that hold it back from being all it can be. For starters, Tom is a hard character to swallow. He is supposedly 16 years old, but frequently acts much older and wiser than his tender years. Granted, he IS an incredibly intelligent child who helped design the maze for the Creators, but I’m not sure that warrants how much more mature than this companions he is. The other Gladers themselves are ALL incredibly intelligent children who have been hand-picked for the maze experiment too. The only other explanation for Tom’s level-headed confidence is the fact that he designed the maze itself. But if you remember, the novel begins with his memories wiped, so they are of no use to him.

The ending of the novel is also problematic as the solution to the maze, along with the identity of the children, and their purpose for existing all come to Tom after he allows himself to be stung by the Grievers and endure the Changing. Logically, there is nothing wrong with the scenario: the Changing is brought about by the poison in a Griever’s sting and gives the person enduring the Changing access to his blocked memories. Emotionally, however, it’s quite jarring for me, the reader, to be faced with all of the answers all at once. It’s too neat, too convenient. Tom’s remembering of everything is too much of a deus ex machina.

The way the maze is actually “solved” strikes me as contrived, also. There is no exit to the maze and, therefore, no solution. It takes Tom to see that the different wall formations spell out a series of words that must be entered into a computer they will find when they jump into an invisible Griever hole. The problem for me is that the entire experiment that puts these children in the maze to begin with stipulates that no child is more important than the others. The experiment itself will weed out the unworthy ones, gather data about the children’s reactions to events, and end with the best suited children surviving the ordeal. Tom, however, is clearly a child the Creators have a vested interest in and without his knowledge of the Griever hole (which is invisible) and the computer (which he placed when he designed the maze), the words the walls spell out are nonsensical and offer the other children NO chance at figuring out the solution by themselves.

All in all…

The Maze Runner has many more good qualities than it has problems. The plot is a little shaky towards the end, but there are no egregious holes that keep it from being plausible, if not believable. The way Dashner ends the book on another cliffhanger is genius as I no sooner put the novel down than began looking online for the sequel.

This novel was successful because I couldn’t wait to snatch up The Scorch Trials. If you haven’t read The Maze Runner, it’s a quick read and enjoyable.

Check out this awesome cover art: