L.G. Estrella's Blog, page 50

Improvement Through Teaching

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to participate in various forms of teaching. I say fortunate because I find teaching immensely rewarding, and I do believe that it is rather undervalued, much to the misfortune of both teachers and students.

Some of my experiences in teaching have been in physical activities. For example, I once ran a martial arts club for a couple of weeks when the owner (a close friend who was one of my instructors during my younger years) went on holiday. However,...

Progress Report

With Divine Assistance now available on Amazon, I’ve been turning my attention to my next project: a collection of short stories set in the same universe as The Unconventional Heroes Series. The stories will features characters from the series, both those you’re already quite familiar with (e.g., Timmy) and those who’ve stayed mostly in the background (e.g., some of the people who work at the castle). The stories will also be set at different times. Some will take place before the beginning o...

The Coffee Shop Scenario

Creating engaging characters is one of the most important tasks for a writer. Engaging characters can rescue a story with a drab plot, and readers will often ignore a writer’s technical limitations if the characters are interesting enough. Although there are many different ways to define what makes characters engaging, a simple definition would be that engaging characters are those that feel alive to the reader, catching and holding their attention and interest.

Every writer has their own app...

Purple Prose and Purpmaxity

Purple Prose and Purpmaxity

It has come to my attention that certain writers have raised objections to the use of purple prose. I disagree. If anything, I believe that prose is not purple enough. It should be so purple as to make the eyes bleed, so purple that it actually goes beyond the visible spectrum, courtesy of an excursion into the ultraviolet. Yet even that would not be purple enough. Imagine prose so purple that the very word ‘purple’ is insufficient to express its purpleness. Inste...

The Importance of the Basics

I am currently helping two children of a family friend with their schoolwork. What has surprised me the most is how little time seems to be spent on the basics in class. Now, this might sound trite, but without the basics, it really is almost impossible to develop a high level of proficiency. This is particularly true for subjects like English and mathematics that build on previous work.

Allow me to furnish two examples.

One of the most important concepts for a high school students to master...

Happy Mother’s Day

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone.

And speaking of mothers, I will always be grateful to mine for putting up with some of the shenanigans my sister and I got up to when we were kids. There were things like the Spider Incident, the Wall-Climbing Incident, the Wood Throwing Incident, the Chicken and Corn Noodle Incident, the Eggplant Incident, and so on (there were a lot of incidents).

But throughout all of them, my mother was always a beacon of sanity, which wasn’t easy when dealing with first two...

Divine Assistance Is Now Available On Amazon!

Are you ready to watch the gods in action? Divine Assistance is now available on Amazon!

Keeping Creation under control is far from easy when you’ve got gods like Mayhem, Mischief, and Rabble to worry about. And what are mortals supposed to do when Life is creating things like the mobra (part mongoose, part cobra, all awesome)? Luckily, there are gods like Death. In between claiming souls, finding a pony for his daughter, and filing his tax returns, he does his best to avoid adding to Bureauc...

Writing From Multiple Perspectives

One technique that is often used in fiction is writing a story from multiple perspectives (i.e., writing from multiple points of view). This can be accomplished by having different characters narrate different chapters or by having multiple characters narrate a chapter. However, there are several things to keep in mind while doing this:

Character differences in vocabulary Character differences in knowledge Character differences in circumstances

The vocabulary that a character uses to descri...

Progress Report and Update

I’ve received some questions about what I’m doing at the moment, and I thought it would be a good idea to let everyone know exactly what’s going on. For various reasons (almost all of them unrelated to writing), I’ve fallen quite far behind schedule. I had hoped to have a collection of short stories released in February. However, it’s already April and that collection of short stories still isn’t done. On the upside, the collection is almost done.

Divine Assistance is the name of the collecti...

I Said Something Cool Today

Today, I had a dental appointment.

During the course of the appointment, I asked my dentist if I could use a mirror to see what he was doing since he’d finally worked out a way for me to get at the interdental (in between) spaces of the front teeth of my bottom jaw. For various reasons, that’s been pretty much impossible for years, and it’s become something of a windmill for both of us to tilt at.

Indeed, my dentist has previously excused me from flossing those teeth because it just doesn...