Bye Bye 2020, Hello 2021

As Tracey Hirt of Bored Panda points out, 2020 reads like a kindergartner’s first attempt at fiction: Um, so first an entire continent was on fire. But then there was this disease, and everyone forgot about that. So then the whole world had to stay home. And school...

Is Santa a Superhero?

Superhero culture seems to play a similar part to ancient mythology, with superheroes being the modern equivalent of gods and demigods. So, you may be excused for wondering if Santa may, in fact, be yet another superhero. Confessions of the Professions has the answer...

More Funny Similes and Metaphors

Seeing how much you enjoyed my recent post, Funny Similes and Metaphors, here’s another one for you. This one’s courtesy of Writer’s Relief, which hosted a metaphor competition. Here are the results. I hope you like them! More Funny Similes and...

A Wizard’s Hat

Have you ever wondered where the pointy wizard hat stereotype stems from? Someone on Quora did and Wendy Carolan had the answer. Where Does the Idea of the Wizard’s Hat Come from? As you can well imagine, the question here refers to the stereotypical pointy blue...

Funny Similes and Metaphors

Mike Kerr, author of the Humour at Work series of books, has some hilarious similes and metaphors I think you’ll enjoy. Use them as inspiration or steal them for your books. After all, Mike himself copied them from high school essays! Her face was a perfect...

Responding to Negative Reviews

Mark Lindsey of Enplug has written an interesting article with tips on how to respond to negative reviews on social media. There seem to be two schools of thought when it comes to reviews. The first is that reviewers need to feel that Amazon is a safe space where they...

Are There Any Primitive Languages?

Once again, Quora has a great answer on linguistics — and the emergence of language in particular. As Thomas Wier points out, the faculty of language is far, far older than our own species. And that, surprisingly, explains why there is no primitive language. Early...

Old Anglo-Saxon Character Names

As someone who knows how hard it can be to choose a character name for your fantasy novel, I came across some interesting discussions on Quora (here and here). They concerned the letter Æ and the evolution of old Anglo-Saxon names. I hope you find it as interesting as...

5 Crucial Tips For Writing Plot Twists

This is a guest post by Desiree Villena. Desiree is a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing with the world’s best editors, designers, and marketers. In her spare time, she enjoys reading contemporary fiction and writing short stories....

Where Are All the Missing Socks?

I had a good laugh when I read on Quora this brilliant answer by Jay Cashen, and just had to share! The question, of course, being what happens to all our missing socks… What happens to all our missing socks? Washers spin clothes at high revs. That generates...