Back when I was entertainment editor at a metropolitan daily, my phone used to ring several times an hour with calls from publicists. I anticipated these calls with about as much enthusiasm as a cat displays for a vet.  Continue reading...

We writers about writing mostly write about "good" writing; we give our readers helpful hints on how to write well and point them to masters like Homer and Dickens to show them how it's done.

Good writing, however, does not form the bulk of writing. Like islands lost in the vast Pacific, writing's great works rise as rare peaks above endless oceans of bad writing, books and journals in which the writing is so poor or feeble or dull or trivial or trite or pompous or false or malicious or stupid that it lives for a day and dies away.  Continue reading...

I was born organized. In fact, I'm the kind of nut-bar who writes a family meal plan once a week. As a child, I longed to sort our family's books by size and color (no one would let me!). Now that I'm the mom, my spice drawer is alphabetized.  Continue reading...

Have you used any of these words in your writing?

• Low-hanging fruit
• Learnings
• Efforting

They are buzzwords, popular industry words that people use to impress others.  Continue reading...

Years ago, after I'd graduated from grade 12 and moved on to higher learning — English 100 and Philosophy 120 — I discovered that my university had a recording library. Hallelujah! Sounds quaint now, I know, but this was more than a generation before iPods, and I was ridiculously excited about getting to hear music via headphones.  Continue reading...

It was a Friday night and I was sitting at my computer studying Google maps. I had to give a speech to more than 200 people the next morning and — given my notoriously bad sense of direction — wanted to be sure I was heading for the right place.

Suddenly, my husband yelled from the basement four words no homeowner wants to hear: "We have a leak."  Continue reading...