Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

 *** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

10TH COLUMBUS BLACK THEATRE FESTIVAL seeks one-act plays and monologues
We are accepting monologues and one-act plays that have diversity, inclusion, and equity of Black and Brown characters for our 10th Annual Columbus Black Theatre Festival (CBTF) that will be held July 8-10 2022, at The Columbus Performing Arts Center and July 16-17 2022, at The Abbey Theatre of Dublin, Ohio.
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Drip Action Theatre Trail 2022 seeks one-act plays
Plays should be between 30 and 40 minutes long, with practicable casting, props and effects and a maximum of five performers. We do not insist on premieres.
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Submissions are now open for the Theatre Southwest - Readers' Theatre Matinee
All genres are accepted (light comedies, heavy dramas, thrillers, mystery, sci-fi, satire) with no regard to language or subject matter). All plays should be 5 to 10 minutes long, no exceptions. (If using standard play format a good gauge is 4-11 pages, excluding title page).
Plays should be conducive to Readers' Theatre with simple stage directions and a story expressed mostly through dialogue, not action.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** FREE ONLINE TOOLS FOR WRITERS ***
COFFITIVITY
When we started Coffitivity, it was very much a side project to build a tool to help us work better. We're a team of entrepreneurs, freelancers, and creatives in Richmond, Virginia, and we all LOVE the vibe of the coffee shop. Today, our goal at Coffitivity is simple: we're here to help you work better. We started with a way to boost your creativity and now we're working on a suite of tools to give you the extra kick in other aspects of your work day.
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DE-JARGONIZER
How accessible is your work? Paste your article or upload a file to analyze the amount of jargon in your writing.
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INTERNET ANAGRAM SERVER
Land Dump Rot
Mad Lord Punt
Lam Pond Turd
Rand Mud Plot
(Some anagrams for "Donald Trump")
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GOOGLE TRANSLATE
Google Translate is in its 15th year and available on the web, as a Chrome browser extension and as an Android and an iOS app. Apple released its Translate app last year for the iPhone and added it to last month’s iOS 15 update for the iPad.
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HEMINGWAY EDITOR
Hemingway App makes your writing bold and clear.
The app highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors; if you see a yellow sentence, shorten or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red.
You can utilize a shorter word in place of a purple one. Mouse over them for hints.
Adverbs and weakening phrases are helpfully shown in blue. Get rid of them and pick words with force, perhaps.
Phrases in green have been marked to show passive voice.
You can format your text with the toolbar.
Paste in something you're working on and edit away. Or, click the Write button and compose something new.
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SMASHWORDS
Welcome to Smashwords! Smashwords is the world's largest distributor of indie ebooks.  We make it fast, free and easy for any author or publisher, anywhere in the world, to publish and distribute ebooks to the major retailers  and thousands of libraries.
FOR AUTHORS, PUBLISHERS AND LITERARY AGENTS, Smashwords offers quick and easy ebook distribution to most of the world's largest ebook retailers.  We provide free tools for marketing, distribution, metadata management and sales reporting.  At Smashwords, our authors and publishers have complete control over the sampling, pricing and marketing of their written works.  Smashwords is ideal for publishing novels, short fiction, poetry, personal memoirs, monographs, non-fiction, research reports, essays, or other written forms that haven’t even been invented yet.
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ONLINE ETYMOLOGY DICTIONARY
This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.
The dates beside a word indicate the earliest year for which there is a surviving written record of that word (in English, unless otherwise indicated). This should be taken as approximate, especially before about 1700, since a word may have been used in conversation for hundreds of years before it turns up in a manuscript that has had the good fortune to survive the centuries.
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PARTS OF SPEECH CHECKER
Parts of Speech Checker tool can help identify the various word classes in your writing.
Parts of speech, also known as word classes, are the building blocks of grammar.
Parts of speech are nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, articles/determiners, and interjection.
Understanding of sentence structure can help identify nouns and pronouns.
Find the clause and phrases to identify conjunctions.
Exclamation points can help identify interjections.
Use the nouns and pronouns in a sentence to find the preposition.
INK Parts of Speech Checker tool can help identify word classes in a sentence.
(Login via your Google or Facebook account is required.)
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PUBLIC DOMAIN REVIEW
Founded in 2011, The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.
As our name suggests, the focus is on works now fallen into the public domain, that vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restriction. Our aim is to promote and celebrate the public domain in all its abundance and diversity, and help our readers explore its rich terrain – like a small exhibition gallery at the entrance to an immense network of archives and storage rooms that lie beyond.

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Quotes for writers

  

 

“If you can quit, then quit. If you can't quit, you're a writer.”― R.A. Salvatore

 

 “Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”   Theory of Fiction: Henry James

 “The crazy creatives are the creatives who never go completely mad. They aren't so easily disheartened by the seemingly endless amounts of scrutiny that creative individuals tend to receive because they,  insanity, are the ones who feed off of opposition and negative feedback and manage to continue along with a healthy ambition. It is the crazy that teaches us to use our gifts wisely and own all the attackers.”― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

 “If you're waiting until you feel talented enough to make it, you'll never make it.”― Criss Jami

 “In essence, if we want to direct our lives, we must take control of our consistent actions. It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.”― Anthony Robbins

 “You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more."― Michael Connelly

 


Word for writers

 

 

Smarmy. Etymologists don't know where smarm (the verb from which it is based) came from, but they do know that it meant "to smear" or "to make smooth or oily" before gaining the meaning "to flatter." The adjective smarmy comes from the latter meaning.


Cynophilist (sy-NOH-fi-list)  One who loves dogs. From From Greek kyon (dog) + -philia (love). Ultimately from the Indo-European root kwon- (dog), which also gave us canine, chenille (from French chenille: caterpillar, literally, little dog), kennel, canary, hound, dachshund, corgi, cynic, cynegetic, cynophobia, cynosure, and canaille. Earliest documented use: 1890. A perfect synonym of today’s word is philocynic.

 

Hoity-toity means "pretentious, fancy, or pompous." Hoity-toity is believed to have been created as a rhyme based on the dialectal English word hoit, meaning "to play the fool." Hoity-toity can mean "foolish" (e.g., "… as though it were very hoity-toity of me not to know that royal personage." — W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge), but it

 


LLR Books: Youth. A Narrative by Joseph Conrad

LLR Books: Youth. A Narrative by Joseph Conrad:     YOUTH A NARRATIVE By Joseph Conrad   ”... But the Dwarf answered: No; something human is dearer to me than the wealth of all t...

LLR Books: MR. BENNETT AND MRS. BROWN by VIRGINIA WOOLF

LLR Books: MR. BENNETT AND MRS. BROWN by VIRGINIA WOOLF:     MR. BENNETT AND MRS. BROWN VIRGINIA WOOLF     MR. BENNETT AND MRS. BROWN It seems to me possible, perhaps desirable, that I ...

LLR Books: Two Stories, by Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf

LLR Books: Two Stories, by Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf:   THREE JEWS By LEONARD WOOLF. It was a Sunday and the first day of spring, the first day on which one felt at any rate spring in ...

LLR Books: THE VEGETABLE a play by F. Scott FitzGerald

LLR Books: THE VEGETABLE a play by F. Scott FitzGerald:   THE VEGETABLE or from President to postman By F. SCOTT FITZGERALD     “Any man who doesn’t want to get on in the world, to make a million ...

The Cornfield Bomber and the Battle of Palmdale


In 1970, during a training exercise, a Convair F-106 Delta Dart, piloted by Captain Gary Faust, flung itself out of control and went into a tailspin near Great Falls, Montana. Captain Faust did what he could to regain control of the plane but was finally ejected out at an altitude of 15,000 feet.

A few seconds later, the plane’s nose dove forward and recovered from its spin. One of the other pilots on the mission was reported to have radioed Faust during his descent by parachute that "you'd better get back in it!"

The plane landed itself gently onto a farmer's field near Big Sandy, Montana, virtually undamaged.

In 1956, an experimental drone was launched over Southern California. After a short time, the drone stopped responding to commands, and it became clear that the drone had become a runaway.

 The Navy, who owned the drone, phoned  Oxnard Air Force Base 5 miles away and asked them to bring the drone down. Two F-89D Scorpions were scrambled and caught up with the drone at 30,000 feet but the drone suddenly southwest, crossing over Los Angeles, then headed northwest, and then circled over Santa Paula. The Scorpion pilots waited for it to fly over an unpopulated area so they could attack with their "Mighty Mouse" 2.75-inch folding-fin rockets

When the drone headed towards the mostly uninhabited Antelope Valley, the jets attempted to fire in automatic mode several times, but due to a design flaw in the fire-control system, the rockets failed to launch.

Suddenly the drone turned back towards Los Angeles.

The jets switched to manual fire only to find out that the jet's gun sights had been removed, forcing the pilots to manually aim unguided rockets. The pilots in one plane fired 42 rockets, completely missing their target. A second interceptor unleashed another salvo of 42, the rockets passing just beneath the bright red drone, a few glancing off the fuselage underside, but none detonating. The pilots then unleashed the last salvo of 30 shots at the target with no hits.

 In all, the Air Force element fired 208 rockets and was unable to shoot the Hellcat down. Of the 208 rockets,  15 were discovered undetonated. The first set of rockets started brush fires 7 miles northeast from Castaic which burned 150 acres

 The drone descended in an easy spiral and landed in a desolate section of the desert 8 miles east from Palmdale Regional Airport. Just before crashing, the drone severed three Southern California Edison electric cables. One rocket bounced along the ground and started a series of fires near a park, while others set fire to oil sumps owned by the Indian Oil Co. The fires reached within 300 feet of the Bermite Powder explosives plant. Other rockets started fires in the proximity of Soledad Canyon, near Mount Gleason, burning more than 350 acres of rough brush.

Of the final set of rockets that were fired while the Scorpions faced Palmdale, many landed in downtown Palmdale. One chunk of shrapnel burst through the front window of a home, ricocheted off the ceiling, went through a wall, and came to rest in a kitchen cupboard.

More rocket fragments completely penetrated a home and garage on 4th Street East. One rocket landed right in front of a vehicle being driven west on California State Route 138 near Tenth Street West, of which one tire was shredded and many holes were punched through the car's body. Two men in Placerita Canyon had been eating in their utility truck; right after they left it to sit under the shade of a tree, a rocket struck the truck, destroying it. Many fires were started near Santa Clarita, with three large ones and many smaller ones in and around Palmdale.

It took 500 firefighters two days to bring the brushfires under control. 1,000 acres were burned.

A little kindness can go a long way.

  

Twenty years ago, Gladys Hankerson of Delray Beach, Florida, was trying to call her sister in Maryland where the area code is 410. Instead, she dialed a Rhode Island exchange where the area code is a similar 401.

Up in Rhode Island, Mike Moffitt answered the phone and politically explained to Gladys that she had dialed the wrong area code. So she hung up tried again, only to reach Mike again, an accident that happened several times over the next few weeks.

"It continually happened,” Mike said, “where she accidentally dialed the wrong number, but it eventually switched to just calling to say hi because one day I said to her, “Listen you're going to keep calling, let's chat”

So they talked. Many times. At a time in both their lives when they needed someone to talk to. Gladys had just lost her son and had come off of a rough divorce. “I was downhearted, and he (Mike) felt my sympathy and everything -- lifted me up,"

The phone friendship developed over twenty years until one day Mike and his family found themselves on vacation in Florida for Thanksgiving.

"The reason we ended up meeting was because a drawbridge was up," Moffitt said. "We waited 10-15 minutes at a drawbridge, and eventually decided to keep going. That's when I realized we were 2 miles away from Gladys' house."

After grabbing some flowers, Moffitt knocked on Hankerson's door and was welcomed with open arms.

"I walked in and said, 'Gladys, it's Mike from Rhode Island!' and she said, 'Oh, my friend Mike! I'm blessed,' and threw her arms up," Moffitt said.

Hankerson gave Moffitt a tour of her house, introduced him to her family and the two caught up like they would on the phone.

"I wish more people could be like that, you know," she said. "That would be so nice. The world would be better, too -- people would be better."




The case of Patty Stallings

 



In 1989, Patty Stalling, a store clerk in St. Louis, rushed her infant son Ryan to the hospital. He was vomiting excessively and was having trouble breathing. Doctors ran tests and concluded that the child had been poisoned with antifreeze. He died in care four days later and Patty was arrested for first-degree murder.


While she was in jail awaiting trial, Patty gave birth to another son, David Jr., on February 17, 1990. He was placed in foster care, had barely been near his mother, but yet, in March, he developed similar symptoms as those that had killed his brother.
Putting the evidence together, a Doctor diagnosed David with methylmalonic acidemia (MMA), a genetic condition in which the body produces propionic acid, a compound that differs from ethylene glycol by one carbon atom and can easily mimic antifreeze poisoning.
With the correct treatments, David recovered but was still kept from his mother.
The Prosecution didn’t buy it. They were convinced that Stallings was a murderer. For them, the diagnosis was wrong, plain and simple. Adding to their case was the fact that Patty’s lawyers couldn’t produce more evidence of her innocence.
In May 1990, defense attorney Eric Rathbone managed to get copies of notes written by assistant prosecutor John S. Appelbaum that indicated that the doctor who pronounced Ryan dead had considered the possibility of an MMA diagnosis, but also that he had not tested Ryan for that.
After the case was featured on national television, biochemist William Sly agreed to test Ryan's blood and gave it to Dr. James Shoemaker, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Metabolic Screening Lab at St Louis University.
Shoemaker immediately confirmed that Ryan had had MMA. Shoemaker asked the prosecutor for the methods that had been used to measure ethylene glycol in Ryan's blood, and McElroy supplied that information. When the method was used on blood from Ryan and DJ, it was seen that propionic acid, which is produced in methylmalonic acidemia, caused a result that careless observers might mistake for ethylene glycol.
Shoemaker then sent samples of propionate-spiked blood to several laboratories, who tested it with the same methods used in the Stallings case. Some of the laboratories came to the incorrect conclusion that the blood reflected ethylene glycol poisoning. Finally, Prosecutor McElroy was convinced that Ryan wasn’t poisoned.
By then Patty had been in prison for two years. She was finally released in 1991. She sued the hospital and laboratories that were involved in Ryan's care and reached an out-of-court settlement. Prosecutors later apologized to her. Still, in 1994, McElroy ran for reelection as Jefferson County prosecutor, and Stallings donated $10,000 to his opponent who won the election.



Art for the Blog of It: Wow....stop and look at this, the shapes, the size...

Art for the Blog of It: Wow....stop and look at this, the shapes, the size...: The Cartwheel Galaxy by NASA Hubble  

Smart man, that Plato. We writers need to make this saying part of our writing code.


Its alright if other writers seem to be whooshing pas you....step aside and let them whoosh or whatever it is. WRITING ISN'T A RACE. Take your time, do it right.







 

my writing assistants

This is Zen, with the bear guy, (left) a toy that has gone through three dogs 

The second and third picture is of Zen, not a well chosen name for him.

 

Words for writers

 

Obfuscate means "to make difficult to understand" or "to be evasive, unclear, or confusing."  Obfuscate comes from the Latin prefix ob- (meaning "over" or "completely") and fuscus ("dark-colored"). That fact gives an idea as to how the word can refer to making something difficult to see or understand—much like how dark, dirty water makes it hard to see the bottom.

 

  Jovial means "markedly good-humored" and describes people and things that are cheerful or full of joy.  In Roman astrology, planets were named after gods, and people were thought to share the personality traits of the god whose planet was rising when they were born. Jupiter, also called Jove, was the chief Roman god and was considered a majestic type who was the source of joy and happiness. The Latin adjective jovialis means "of or relating to Jove." In French, this had become jovial, which English borrowed and used to describe people and things full of cheer or joy.




Art for the Blog of It: Herself, Robert Henri, 1913,

Art for the Blog of It: Herself, Robert Henri, 1913,:     Robert Henri painted Himself (1924.912) and Herself (Irish terms of endearment for a husband and wife) during a summer trip to Ireland;...

Writers under surveillance

  

Writers under surveillance

 

By Sarah Mangiola

In the height of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, men and women armed with a pen were sending shockwaves down the government agency’s spine. Accused of spreading ideals that supported communism and anti-war efforts—among other “dangerous thoughts” of the time—the FBI started surveying certain authors they considered to be a threat.

Included in this list were literary giants like James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, Susan Sontag, and more. Some, like Baldwin, knew they were being surveyed—while others had no idea. MuckRock obtained the files through a Freedom of Information Act request, giving the public access to the pages and pages of surveillance the FBI did on these authors. The new book, Writers Under Surveillance: The FBI Files, collects the files of 16 authors—spanning from writers in the early 1900s to those still active today. The following four writers were targeted by the Bureau for everything from potentially writing an exposé to visiting enemy territory during a war. 

Baldwin was a novelist and playwright, known for his social criticism. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), is one of his most popular stories, as is Giovanni’s Room (1956)—which was met with much controversy at the time of its publication due to its explicit sexual content involving two men.

In a 1964 interview with Playbill, following his Broadway run of Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin mentioned that he was planning to write a book on the FBI. The thought of a potential exposé terrified the Bureau, spurring their own investigation into the author. Accused of being a communist, the FBI went on to collect thousands of pages on Baldwin before dropping the case a decade later.

Arguably best known for his science fiction story Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury started being surveyed by the FBI when they suspected him of being a communist sympathizer. Though you’d think his commentary on censorship in Fahrenheit 451 would draw interest from the FBI, Bradbury wasn’t on the Bureau’s radar until 1956—three years after the publication of his popular book—when he was named as a literary figure possibly involved in the Cultural Congress of Havana in Cuba.

Though the FBI could not find proof of his membership to the Communist Party, they scrutinized his writing—looking for hidden messages. Using a comment Bradbury once made about the ridiculousness of making members of the Screen Writers Guild swear they were not members of the Communist Party, informant Martin Berkley twisted Bradbury's words and actions to make it seem like the author used his own science fiction stories to instill fear in Americans.

Susan Sontag was a writer and social critic, flagged by the FBI for her anti-Vietnam War efforts. Her file begins in 1968 after she was arrested for “disorderly conduct” following a protest. Even more, the FBI was tipped off that Sontag travelled to Northern Vietnam after receiving an invitation from their government, which was a violation of her passport at the time. Though they initially lacked evidence, the trip was essentially confirmed when an Esquire feature was published—depicting her trip to Hanoi and her conversation with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong.

The investigation stretched on for two years after that, until a final report—dated in March 1972—stated that Sontag was more of a nuisance than a credible threat, and speaking to her might cause embarrassment for the Bureau since she was writer.

In contrast to the other writers on this list, Hemingway actually acted as an FBI informant while living in Cuba. Moving to the island after finishing For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940, Hemingway began working for the American Embassy in Havana after forming a relationship with Ambassador Spruille Braden. He recruited barmen, waiters, and others for the low-budget program, which was unimpressive to the Bureau. At one point, Hemingway referred to a government official as a member of the Gestapo, and also constantly showed his contempt for the Bureau. Even J. Edgar Hoover stated that it would be the last time they would use someone like Hemingway as an informant., Hemingway was still doing work for the Navy, before going on to publish The Old Man and the Sea and win the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

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