Linda K. Sienkiewicz's Blog, page 38

Fun with math. Really.

Playing Foxland!

I have to share this amazing math game my granddaughter made for school called “Foxland.” We had so much fun playing the other day. Actually, I was quite pleased to discover that I remembered how to use a multiplication table. My skills are a little rusty.

The game pieces are little foxes!

The game moves really fast. You pick a card and solve the math problem (such as 5 x __ = 25) and move your fox according to the answer.

Watch out for traps. There’s a live chicken in the p...

American Girl Sensibility

 

En route to American Girl, Chicago, with granddaughter and doll in matching tops and hair bows. Ninth birthday

For my granddaughter’s ninth birthday, my daughter and I took her to the American Girl Doll store in Chicago. I had been unaware of the evolution of this iconic doll since my daughter had Molly in the 80s.  The Atlantic lamented in 2013, after Mattel purchased the company, that the dolls and their stories have been more or less sanitized, and a “lost sensibility about teaching girl...

Can Twitter Help You Finish Your Book?

Today’s post about how Twitter can actually help you finish your book is from award-winning author A.B. Funkhauser, whom coincidently I met on Twitter!

Finish that WIP:

A friend recently asked me to fly to England and finish his work in progress (WIP). He was kidding, of course. I had just typed “The End” on a manuscript that had joyously taken up fifteen months of my life, and somewhere between the celebratory Chablis and Chardonnay, I managed to post the jolly news on all of my platforms.

...

What, Why, How: Patrick Shawn Bagley

What:

I write crime and horror fiction, mostly with a hardscrabble rural setting. My characters tend to be people who are damaged in some way even before I put them through the wringer, and my endings are rarely what you’d call “happy.” I’ve written and published poetry, though not in the last few years. Prose takes up all of my writing time.

Why:

Why do I write, and why do I write what I do? It sure isn’t for the money, though a bit more of that would help keep a roof over my head. I sup...

Wading into Writing for Children

My mockup of the draft of my picture book – I made it for my grandkids to enjoy now. It began with a Ghost Crab Incident

On a family vacation last summer, my daughter took my then 8-year old granddaughter and 3-year old grandson to the beach after dusk to look for Atlantic ghost crabs (they’re most active in the evening). Dozens of them were skittering around, and it was fun watching them until a large crab startled Oliver by running across the top of his shoe. That was it. From then on, he i...

What, Why, How: Karen W. Pullen

What:

What compels me to write?  Maybe it’s in my DNA, like my pointy nose and near-sightedness. My new book, Cold Heart, is dedicated thus: “To my mother, Juanita H Williams, who would’ve liked it.” She was a journalism major at the University of Kentucky for two years until she married my dad and took a ten-year break from her studies to produce four children. She went back to school for a PhD in psychology, and wrote a ground-breaking text book that still, after thirty years, generates a...

What, Why, How: Karla Huston

What:

I write poetry; I write poetry reviews. I’ve committed acts of fiction but decided long ago that writing poetry was more fun, more satisfying than writing a 20-or-30-page story. I have no desire to write a novel. I can’t imagine extending a story for 400 pages. Those characters totally out of my control! But that’s the point, I guess, and how good novels are written. Characters whisper in your ear and tell you what to say next, and you sometimes have no control over it.

Writing poetry...

What, Why, How: Herta Feely

What:

I was working on my second novel (In Search of Che) and had reached page 100 when the story came to a screeching halt. I felt like a person trekking through a forest who’s lost sight of the trail. You look everywhere, but alas it’s gone. The muse had forsaken me.

But, likewise, one never knows when inspiration will strike or how or why. On January 10, 2008, I ran across an article in the Washington Post, titled: “A Deadly Web of Deceit.”  I’m one of those people who have always had a sl...

The Cold War: Bomb Shelter Drills

I saw this post on Twitter

And it brought back memories of the bomb shelter drills when I was in elementary school. They were frightening, to say the least, and they certainly captured the Cold War feel of the time. As a child, I didn’t understand why our teacher was so cheery. Did Communists, aka Commies, really want us dead? I seriously doubted if there was any way to actually protect us from a bomb. Hiding in the bowels of the school was nuts.

Then there were the Saturday afternoon Atomi...

What, Why, How: Pam Houghton

What:

Freelance journalism and creative non-fiction

Why:

I worked in the corporate world for over 20 years but never felt I was in the right field. It didn’t help that Oprah and her ilk were always saying things such as, “Live your best life now.” But there I was, stuck in a job that felt MEH…though in hindsight I developed many great work skills, said Pam, from the sunnier side of the street.

How:

While working, I started writing as an outlet for my frustrations. Folks in writing groups cate...