Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, so today we’re going to write about that marvelous day of romance and all-around caring. In its origins, the day supposedly honored Valentinus, a martyr in Roman times who was imprisoned and executed for performing weddings for soldiers not allowed to marry and for helping the Christians. It was author Geoffrey Chaucer who associated St. Valentine’s…
Join the fun and sign up for our next nine-week Writing Your Life class, which begins on Thursday, March 14th and runs through Thursday, May 9th. Classes are held on eight consecutive Thursdays from 4:30 – 7:00 p.m. at the Marks Street Recreational Center in downtown Orlando. On the ninth week of class, we enjoy a public reading and reception where…
In the last month, I’ve had the great pleasure of spending time with genealogists in Flagler County, The Villages, and Sarasota. Many of them have been researching family history for thirty years or more; one woman dedicated much of the last sixty years to discovering branches of her family tree. That’s a lot of names, dates, and places, but it…
Good writing requires good editing, and putting pen to paper is just the beginning. It’s time to take your writing from promising to polished! Editing: Make Your Stories Shine Workshop March 16, 2013 9:00 am – 4:00 pm Lake Fairview, Orlando, FL You have a heap of stories in front of you. You’ve worked long and hard to get them…
Today, let’s write about love. Who is it or was it in your life who taught you the most about love? What did they teach you? How did they teach you about love? Pay attention to the first name or image that pops into your mind. It might not be who you expect, but don’t immediately push it away. Consider…
Thank you so much for the warm welcome to The Villages Genealogical Society. I was quite impressed with your group and the quality of writing in the few exercises we read. I’m sure yours was wonderful, too. Here’s a link to a copy of the poem I read, “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon and some of the responses written…
You’ve been looking at those boxes of information, the binders of data you’ve so painstakingly assembled over the years of researching your family history. You wonder if your children or grandchildren will treasure all the copies and photographs and documents as much as you do. Unfortunately, they probably won’t. That’s why it’s so important to take the information you have…
Yesterday, I decided I needed a little visual help in promoting my book, Eating an Elephant: Write Your Life One Bite at a Time, so I ventured into a Toys R Us store for the first time in my life and searched until I found just what I was looking for—Alphie the Elephant. Alphie is so soft and huggable that…
We rely on our senses—sound, sight, touch, smell and taste—every minute of every day to navigate our lives, but those senses can also be a vehicle that takes us back to long ago times and places. Think about the “taste” of your childhood. What were the foods that defined your early years? What were the non-foods that also ended up…
Every now and then, I like to do something I call writing sprints. I give you a word, and you have just two minutes to write whatever comes to mind. There’s not much time to think, so you just have to jump in and write the first thing you think about. The New Year often comes with resolutions to exercise…
