I love time travel stories. Back to the Future, Quantum Leap, HG Wells’ The Time Machine, Time After Time, Somewhere in Time, Slaughterhouse-Five, even the Terminator movies franchise. Whether by self-hypnosis, worm-hole, steampunk contraption, or DeLorean, the idea of moving forward or backward on a timeline is tantalizing. Why? It is the simple idea of …
Change my life
Gifts
Raise your hand if you’re done Christmas shopping. Are you still looking for the perfect gift? Do you have something for everyone, or do you keep it simple? Is it a grab-bag kind of event in your family? Actually, I really don’t mean those kinds of gifts. To get to what kinds of gifts I …
Choices
First, let me take a moment to marvel that this post marks two years of Sudden Write Turn. The blog itself hasn’t gone viral, netted a book deal, or attracted monetizing ads or affiliations. That was never the point of the blog. The point was to make me write, every week, for discipline’s sake and …
A Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf first said it in 1928 while lecturing at the two (separate) women’s colleges at Cambridge: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” I’ll not get into the discussion of Woolf’s essay as feminist text, but she had made a very practical, obvious point. …
Stir Crazy
Just over six months ago I entered into the freelance life. Prior to that I had been working for twenty-five years, part-time for the first seven of those years during high school and college (which is almost like full-time with a twist considering the daily structure and demands of secondary and higher education.) So, what’s …
Timing: “Man plans; God laughs.”
It’s a Yiddish proverb, meaning roughly that while we scurry around trying to mold our lives into a certain shape, we fail to acknowledge that there are unknown forces/random chance at work that are likely to derail our efforts. I don’t know that we should view that as proof of a toying God, or that …
Updates to Portfolio Pages!
The whole point of this blog is to exhibit my writing skills and build a portfolio. Well, I’m pleased to report that the portfolio is growing! Today I added new examples of my desktop publishing and a new feature article recently published in Suburban News. More articles are in the pipeline and I am preparing …
Progress
I remember that it took me a long time to learn to tie my shoes. All the kids were ahead of me on this one and even my practice lace-up shoe box didn’t help; in my hands, the laces simply did not tie. I was reminded of that feeling of helpless confusion this week when …