Recent content by JLT

Welcome! What genres are you interested in pursuing?

In other words, what Kurt Vonnegut wrote.

I've always wondered if shared a lineage with "carousel"... it invokes an image of people laughing as they go round and round.

Emphasis. "I won't say he was scared. I'd say he was really, really scared."

I thought it would be a moving experience.

I know where you got that from. But you know that Tom Lehrer reminded us that Lobachevsky was actually a well-respected mathematician rather than the idea-stealing villain of that song. The name was chosen for "purely prosodic reasons."

I think it might be nice to use that thought tag along with the italics for the first time or two that you are indicating thought, just to let the reader know what your conventions are. After all, readers usually need all the help they can get. But after that, once the convention is established...

I think I maybe told this before: when my brother went to his first math class at Princeton University, there was something written on the blackboard as he entered the room: "1 + 1 = 3 for all values of 1 sufficiently large and all values of 3 sufficiently small." That was when he knew he...

You really should. It's one of those movies, like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or Testament, that I'm glad I saw but probably wouldn't want to see very often. The most entertaining write-up of that theory is by Cecil Adams and can be found here...

I'm kind of going through that right now. My wife is dealing with cancer and the aftermath of a stroke and a heart attack which left her unable to do more than stand up for a few seconds. Now she's walking again with a walker and fetching snacks from the kitchen, but she has a long way to do. I...

Well, characters grow over time, and confront situations where they're forced to get out of their usual mindset. A classic example is Huckleberry Finn repudiating what he was taught about supporting slavery. If you're talking about plot twists, I think the best one was in the movie In America...

Odd thought. The "tomboy trope" is that girls don't act like girls, doing little-girl things like playing with dolls or playing house or dreaming of beaux. They go out with the boys and do active things like climbing trees or doing sports and the like. Was it Simone de Beauvoir that said that...

As a septuagenarian, I can attest that I took one course in my senior hear in high school (1965-1966). It was called "sociology" but was really a course in being presented information and analyzing it for merit. We took on subjects like racial bias, drug use, and moral issues and debated them...

You know the feeling, then. It is real. Thanks for sharing that. I wrote a poem about how the presence of my first wife still haunts me, thirty-some years after she died. I posted it on the last forum, but I don't know if I posted it on this one. It's in my blog...

I used to do algebra problems just for fun. And I did OK in higher math classes until I got to integral calc. That was my Achilles' heel. I do, too, but geometry is useful to calculate area when you're buying carpets or paint. If you don't know it, you'd better hope that the person selling you...