The Cellist of Sarajevo

Ever since I attended one of their concerts several Decembers ago, Trans-Siberian Orchestra has been one of my favorite associations with Christmas.  I’m a sucker for rock/orchestra fusion, and the modernized carols for which TSO is best known make the season feel like Christmas to me more than any other music can.  This is useful for getting into the holiday spirit, since I currently live in a part of the country where singing “the weather outside is frightful” in December can plausibly refer to a heat index that damages house plants and necessitates that children and the elderly stay inside.

The soul of wit

One year while I was in graduate school, I served as the literary editor for the campus student magazine. My job was to review student-submitted poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction and select the few best to publish. After several months of enduring vomit-inducing drivel, I tried to energize the campus literary talent by having a “flash fiction” contest. Flash fiction is a relatively recent term. For those not familiar, it refers to short stories that happen to be very short—usually less than 1,000 words, and often much shorter. I figured dangling a prize before the student body was the surest way to flush out any creative talent lurking about campus, and, even if most of the entries were terrible, I didn't have to read them for very long. It was a win-win situation.

Just start typing and see what happens

Attention all would-be storytellers: NaNoWriMo begins in just one month. Don’t be caught unprepared. What’s NaNoWriMo, you ask? Why, it’s National Novel Writing Month, of course. Granted, if you feel so inclined, you may begin writing whenever you want. However, as I understand it, that’d be cheating.

National Novel Writing Month—which, oddly enough, is no more difficult to spell out in its entirety than the portmanteau that requires hitting the shift key four times—has been going on every November for just over a decade.