I missed by self-imposed deadline by a few hours, but I did, at least, finished the Solstice edition of my newsletter! (Go read, like, and subscribe if you're so inclined.) What about this week? It was finals week at school. I still have a few essays to grade and grades to enter. The end-of-term seems …
How has your week been? This week involved a big argument. I can't write about it yet, but it consumed much of the week. But then today, in the midst of errands and required phone calls, we picked up our Sadie's ashes. I'm not the sort of person who wants to keep the ashes. That's …
Have you seen this book? I like it. Along with a similar book, The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker. (See his Substack. It's a favorite of mine.) If you know of other such books, please say so in the comments. Today, after taking three dogs to the vet, voting in a local run-off election, …
Pictured above is Sweet Sadie. We said goodbye to her yesterday. In September 2010, my son and I found her at the Humane Society. She was two. She was thin and sad, anxious about getting the car with strangers, worried about being in our apartment. But soon she settled in, befriended our other dog, Porter, …
I've been getting back into zines. I think I've mentioned this before, but I'm going to talk about it again because now I have a zine shelf! So, I bought a few at conventions a few years before the pandemic, and then during the pandemic, I made a few as part of Story-a-Day May. Each …
When was the first ghost? If a ghost appears in a house and no one is there to see it, is it still a ghost? Do ghosts sleep? Why are there no ghost dinosaurs? . . . Or are there? Do ghosts ever hang out in a room and watch whatever movie the living turn …
Did you know that you don't need to be overwhelmed, you can just be whelmed? No, that's not, apparently, an improvement. They mean the same thing. But to say one is whelmed doesn't have the same ring to it, does it? Over adds that oomph the feeling needs to truly express itself. Recently I watched …
I had this vague idea that zines started in the 70s, but no. They started in the 1930s. Was there a zine scene in my hometown in the 1980s? I've no idea. I wasn't cool and I didn't hang out in cool places where such things existed. When did I first learn about zines? I …
We know have Christmas lights strung in four rooms in our house. Yes, I'm one of those people. When I plug in the strand of lights in my office, the space changes. Now it feels like The. Creative. Space. It doesn't feel like news to say light affects us. Many of us struggle in seasons …
The other in my writing class, we were talking about awkward sentences, redundancies, and wordiness. Students tend to write things like, "the daughter of my sister" when perhaps they could've written "my sister's daughter" or even "my niece." Not to mention the number of times they'll write "always" or "very" on one page. A few …
Marta Bacon 