Category Archives: Writing

Monti’s First Book Published

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Monti (with the help of Jolene and me) has published his first book about how he wants to go to school. Inspired by his Therapy visits to schools he wants to be a regular student and visits a friend’s classroom to prove he has what it takes.

Hardcover 8″x8″ books are available. Email jolene@randysbooks.com for details. They can be prepaid via PayPal. Books are produced through Shutterfly and we’re taking advantage of special offers to keep the price down and selling them for $20 plus postage with any amount over our cost going to benefit Spinone Health & Rescue.

You can watch a short video of the entire book below:

AAPA February Picks

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Most of my picks can be read by clicking on this photo to enlarge it. Poetic Voices you see only the cover of the small booklet, of course, though it was the cover that caught my eye..

I was honored to be asked to provide the February Picks for the American Amateur Press Association which distributes members’ printing and writing efforts each month in a “Bundle”. You can see my article and other AAPA stuff here.

Forgot My Cell Phone

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Photo on 3-2-19 at 8.34 AMAh the digital life… if you can remember your phone. I suppose I’m actually a bit happy that I’m not so attached to my  cell phone that I can’t forget it. Of course as I’m sitting here at Griddle and Grind without it and needing to make a phone call a tiny bit of me wishes I would be.

The cell phone is on that list of things in my life that despite its apps to locate now occupies too much time simply looking for it. When it’s lost it’s simply out of reach, not miles away so the apps don’t help. I even have a device on my keys to make it play a tune but the sound is still hard to locate and of course using it depends on my ability to locate my keys first. If I can’t find those I can use my phone to find them… oh that’s right. That’s what I’m looking for in the first place.

Is the keyboard mightier than the sword?

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mac_pens 190212

Pentel Tradio; Hand turned Furnace Hill Cedar; Schmidt; Noodlers Ink, TWSBI Eco T; Lamy Safari; Diplomat Traveller

Perhaps it takes a fountain pen. At least a good gel pen or even a high quality pencil. The first for me is the weapon of choice though I admit a definite practicality of a keyboard. Hence my adoption of this blog as an exercise in creative writing. When updated via my iPad it gets worse with the onscreen keyboard I am reduced to a slow tapping of the keys with a finger or at most two.

Fountain pens demand attention. Left too long without use dries them out and makes them temperamental. I have too many to make this work. Some are destined to too little use. Writing more this way won’t help them.

At the Scheherazade

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At the Sheherazade – a windowless, slant-floored hall, with a siding of tin sheets stamped to resemble bricks, an interior decorated by a few Chinese lamps and Art Deco stripes, an outside ticket booth containing the owner’s gray-haired wife, and a marquee whose lights attracted masses of moths in the summer – the rich, played by Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, Joan Blondel and Katharine Hepburn, Charles Coburn and Eugene Pallette, were projected in an affectionate silvery light, as stars in a comedy of misunderstanding eventually remedied by sexual attraction and a limitless reserve of lightly taxed money. What a triumph of capitalist art that was, deflecting the poor from hatred of the rich into a chuckling pity for them! With a flick of changed fortune, the poor might be rich themselves, as foolish and happy.

John Updike – Villages

Building Great Sentences 2: Grammar & Rhetoric

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Examines key terms concerning sentences like: effectiveness and elegance, and grammar and rhetoric comparing and contrasting each. The concern of grammar in this course is only to the point that it helps with expression, the focus being on how sentences work rather than how to label each part.

Assignment: Pick an opening sentence from a newspaper or magazine and rewrite it in a completely different style.

Building Great Sentences 1: A Sequence of Words

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Introduces a number of assumptions upon which the entire course rests. Explores the vertical ladder of abstraction, how the same words in different order have different meanings, that the way sentences convey information adds to or changes the information, and that there’s no difference between style and content.

Assignment: Provide sentences of varying lengths that give you pleasure.