Writing is Cake

The shotgun was heavy in the boy’s hand. It was an old .410–a single-shot Winchester with a top lever action and an exterior hammer. His grandpa had been shooting it since childhood, and in the chamber was an old-fashioned paper cartridge filled with birdshot. The boy had three more shells tucked into his shirt pocket, [...]

In David Foster Wallace’s article entitled “Tense Present:  Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage,” the late novelist, essayist, and part-time college instructor asks:  “Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a nearly hanging-chad scale?”  Foster was himself a [...]

Crap!  It’s almost November.  That means National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo for us hipster doofuses.  I am not done with my current project (also a novel) but I’m going in anyway.  Screw it!  This event is about getting the damn words on paper.  Well, on the computer screen but whatever.  I’m not waiting until next year [...]

The teenager who works behind the counter at the corner convenience store after school; the hot girl in spandex who works out at the gym in the mornings; the elderly widow that lives across the street and two houses down. What do they have in common? Well, in a zombie story, they may [...]

“[Bill] entered the room, which could only be described as nondescript.”
I’m going to leave off the citation of where I stumbled across that particular sentence to protect the guilty.  The next few lines, not surprisingly, proceeded to describe the room.  It was an office waiting room, with tan carpeting, brown chairs, neatly stacked magazines, and [...]

Shuffling and shambling their way onto the screen and into popular culture, the zombie has gained widespread appeal as a horror film and book icon.  From their first appearance in Night of the Living Dead to the frightening (and sometimes frightful) abundance of subsequent offerings, the undead horde relentlessly propel themselves onward, seeking fresh brains [...]

It was still dark as we raced along the interstate outside Camp Verde. Some fresh snow had fallen during the night, and there were plenty of slick patches on the road—“black ice” as it is called—especially over the bridges and overpasses. We saw this as a good omen, because snow and ice are precisely what [...]

Yes, the title is reminiscent of the only song by Culture Club that I can stand, but it fits the topic so….thank you Boy George?
Part of the beauty and frustration of the English language is that it is constantly changing. Not only does this relate to morphemes and phonemes but it applies to punctuation [...]