The Magic of Language There is a certain kind of magic around language that we don’t realize very often since it is so much a part of our lives. On one hand, language is a way to transmit all the deep things inside of you to other people. There is nothing else that can do…
I, Fry Cook
I, Fry Cook Burger Lux felt like the unholy fusion of a crypt and a factory. A craptory, as I called it. There was no dining area, just four drive-thru windows along one side of the building. Behind the windows, a swarm of machines cut and fried and wrapped and packed 24 hours a day,…
Muse on Monday – January 3, 2022
Happy New Year, everyone! It’s a brand new year and a great time to restart Muse on Monday. Moving forward, I want to make this more accessible to writers with their own blogs or websites. You can still submit your story here for a chance to get it published with next weeks prompt, or just…
Happy New Year from the Green-Walled Treehouse!
Hello everyone from the small house with the green walls. It might be a bit colder outside where you are, but it’s always green here. You can be assured that we are still here. We took a break for a bit in the last month but we will be back in 2022 with more stories,…
Writing Corner: Efficient Writing
Efficient Writing One great thing about writing is that it is free. You might need a computer or at least paper and a pen, but after that, you are free to write literally anything you want and as much as you want. However, that is not true if you want people to actually read your…
Muse on Monday – November 22, 2021
Happy Monday and happy birthday to Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian author of the graphic novel Persepolis. This is also the day that C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite writers, died in 1963, the same day as Aldous Huxley and John F. Kennedy. Quite the momentous day. Second, this is the week of Thanksgiving in the…
Writing Corner: As…as Comparisons
As…as Comparisons One of the ways that English has to describe things is with comparisons using as…as, as in “as big as a house”. It is similar to metaphorical language because we can describe unknown or alien things by comparing them to known things. English has a huge number of set examples of these. For…
Being Prepared
Being Prepared That story of the grasshopper and the ant haunted me. When I moved out to the forest, Thoreau-style, I was determined to BE PREPARED. All summer I cut wood, stacking it against the walls until the whole house was surrounded by piled firewood, five feet deep, then ten feet. By fall, the house…
Muse on Monday – November 15, 2021
Did you know that this week is International Education Week? All over the world, people are holding special activities about international eduation. I am holding a workshop on academic writing for students in Sri Lanka and Kazakhstan on Wednesday. Muse on Monday is a weekly writing challenge. Anyone can join and the idea is to…
Writing Corner: Flashbacks
Flashbacks Today we’re going to look at the idea of a story-inside-a-story. This is when the main story stops to tell a second story. The most common form of this is a flashback, which is why I used it for the title of the post. There are other types of stories-inside-a-story as well. Today we…
The Green-Walled Treehouse 