Sunday Snippets: Opening Line Prompt

This past week I gave my teen writers an opening line and then they had to write what happened next. Of course, I participated in the writing exercise as well and I didn't expect to go Jurassic Park on everybody, but here we are. The opening line is italicized to distinguish what I came up …

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Top Ten Tuesday: Fantasy Jobs I Wish I Had

This week's Top Ten Tuesday prompt is Characters Whose Job I Wish I Had. At first, I wasn't sure what to make of this prompt, but then as I thought about it, I realized how fun this prompt could be. These are mostly ridiculous and would never be a thing in our world, but hey, …

Sunday Snippets: Show vs Tell Part 2

Last week, I shared an exercise I did with my teen writers from the library that had to do with showing vs. telling. I didn't want the post to get too long, so I didn't include a second exercise we worked on during the same writing club meeting. This exercise was put together by a …

Sunday Snippets: Show vs Tell

We discussed show vs tell, briefly, during my last meeting with my teen writers. It's a tricky element of writing that is super important but hard to grasp. So I had them do a fun exercise where I gave them three phrases to pick from and then they had to write a scene that depicted …

Sunday Snippets: Birthday Poem

A few months ago when I was going over poetry with the teen writing club at the library, I wrote a poem about birthdays. Celebrations of any kind often leave me frustrated or disappointed. I grew up making Christmas and birthday lists for my parents and wouldn't get most of what I asked for (and …

Sunday Snippets: 2021 Writing Goals

For the last teen writing club meeting at my library, I had my teen writers answer a series of questions to get them thinking about what they want to accomplish with their writing in 2021. I found the questions to be helpful to get myself thinking about my 2021 goals as well and I thought …

Sunday Snippets: Dialogue Exercise

It's been a while since I shared a writing exercise. This one was paired with a mini-lesson on avoiding info dumps in writing for my teen writers at the library. Basically, I challenged them to write a scene that explains the culture // world // time // etc. a character is living in entirely through …

Writing Update: NaNoWriMo 2020

So I meant to write this post for last Sunday but once I hit the 50K mark for NaNo, I was so exhausted that I just didn't feel like writing a blog post or the rest of the novel. It happens. I hit 50K a couple days early with every intention to keep going with …

November Break + Writing Update

With NaNoWriMo upon us and feeling super drained from work, politics, and pandemic, I'm going to take another month break in November. I want to store up some inspiration on what to do with this blog and how to approach book spotlight posts. I might still publish Hump Day Happiness posts because they're easy and …

Sunday Snippets: Light Poetry

This will probably be the last bit of poetry I share for a while since the teen writing club is moving on to other topics. I don't usually find myself writing poetry, so I don't anticipate having a lot to share in the future. But then again, who knows when inspiration will strike? This past …