Writer’s Digest posted an article I wrote that originally appeared in the magazine: 5 Writing Lessons Inspired by Famous Writers. A sample: I was 16 when I visited the cabin where Mark Twain wrote “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras…
I have a new article with Mental Floss: 10 Surprising Facts About Archie Comics. Remember that time Archie was a superhero called Captain Pureheart? Remember the Archie Andrews radio show? Remember that time Archie was used to piss off The…
I have a new article up at Mental Floss called 9 Controversial Experiments In Rewilding. Excerpt: Strange as it is to imagine, at one point lions roamed Europe, horses galloped over Spain, and jaguars prowled parts of the United States.…
AdviceToWriters interviewed me about being a writer. How nice! Here’s a sample of the interview: What’s your advice to new writers? Learn to love discipline. Set up a schedule for yourself—a word count to hit, an amount of time at…
It’s unsettling that California has decided to skip winter. The governor declared a major drought emergency. Accuweather says no rain until February 23. (And apparently there will be “abundant sunshine” on February 14th.) It’s scary, but the sunshine is also…
Here’s part of an essay by Junot Diaz about the difficulty he had writing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. It’s pretty astounding what he went through. This essay originally appeared in…
I have a short humor piece in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. It’s called Edit Your Novel With Math. A sample: With scissors, cut out all unique words used in the novel. Put these words in a bowl of water for three…
My newest article in Mental Floss is 39 Dishes from the First Christmas Menu, Published in 1660. If the thought of planning Christmas dinner makes you nervous, be glad you weren’t born in the Renaissance. The earliest known published Christmas…
My newest article on Mental Floss is about Santa Claus. It turns out that a church in Bari, Italy has St. Nicholas’s remains and they claim that his bones are releasing a sweet smelling liquid that they call manna. Every…
Jack London may have been frequently drunk but he was also like the Stephen King of his day–the most famous, highest-paid writer around. He wrote 1,000 words a day, 6 days a week. This discipined practice allowed him to be…