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…

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…

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…

Voodoo Ergonomics

Voodoo Ergonomics “Hey, check it out,” Hyo-Won said, pulling me into the corner of the classroom. She reached into her bag and took out a small doll. It was crudely made, with big, uneven stitches. “Nice,” I said. “Did your little sister make it for you?” “No!” She smacked my arm. “It’s a voodoo doll….

Muse on Monday – November 8, 2021

Hello everyone! Thanks for joining another Muse on Monday here at the Green-Walled Treehouse. I was on a trip in Central Asia for the last few weeks but I’m back now with a new prompt. Muse on Monday is a weekly writing challenge. Anyone can join and the idea is to write a story based…

The People Watcher

Nobody really sees me. I’m just the boy cleaning up spilled French fries and wiping spilled ketchup and nugget dipping sauce off the tables. There is a high level of invisibility with that job. But I see them. It is like watching snapshots of other worlds coming in. You see them for an instance and…

Writing Corner: Story Arcs – The End

Story Arcs: The End In the previous Writing Corner post, we looked at the ending part of the story arc. This is usually the shortest and least important part of the story arc. However, it is still important since this is the last thing the reader will read. Last week, I mentioned the idea of…