Welcome to Fiction Friday.  For the past few Fridays I’ve shared with y’all a glimpse into the mind of Zach the Zombie and some of his friends.  Today, I wanted to share a little bit about the early days. You know the drill–this is only very minimally edited, so grace and forgiveness, please…no red pens!  🙂 When the Rot started, everyone kind of freaked out. Some people sought out doctors and nurses.  Some of them tried to help, but they began to rot too.  They couldn’t explain it any more than any of the wise Priests, or the Shaman, or the […]

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Welcome to Fiction Friday.  As you can tell, this is shaping up to be a character-driven zombie story, and for the past few Fridays I’ve shared with y’all a glimpse into the mind of Zach the Zombie. You know the drill–this is only very minimally edited, so grace and forgiveness, please…no red pens!  🙂 Scott and Kennath stumbled around the corner and lurched down the road.  Everyone stayed clear of them.  We always did. They had Brain Rot. Overall, our little community is pretty peaceful.  We all mostly keep to ourselves, go about our business.  We work together when we […]

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I am not a good curator. When I think of curator, I think of a musty dusty museum and someone who likes to type little cards that go next to a fragment of bone: Fibia (fragment). Wooly Mammoth. 10,000 b.c. They don’t spend their time or energy finding out that the mammoth’s name was Joe, or that he had a mate and sired about 15 baby wooly mammoths, or that he broke his left ankle during a stampede and walked with a limp which is why the lion got him and ate him and he ended up in the museum. […]

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You know the drill.  No red pens…   The girl looked at Zach, her head just tipped to the left. “So, um, you’re from…where?” “Outside.” Her eyebrows furrowed as she thought about this. “Outside?” “Yeah.  Outside.” Then she spotted his hand as it slipped from behind his back. She shifted her weight to her back foot.  “Oh.  Um…” The rot was bad right now, and Zach swore under his breath as he slid his hand behind his back again.  “It’s not what you think.  Really.  Please.  I need your help.” “Look, I don’t think you’re supposed to be here.  How […]

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Seth Godin posted recently that experiments are only experiments if you’re intentional about learning something.  If you don’t approach it this way, it’s not an experiment.  It’s a failure. You can still learn from failure, sure.  But you’ll learn faster from an experiment.  So….. With this in mind, I just wrapped up a 4-week experiment where I edited and re-posted daily excerpts from when we were in Ukraine adopting Masha five years ago. I learned: Weekends suck for blog traffic. More frequent posts do not equal increased subscriptions. Very few readers left comments. People emailed me that they loved the adoption story posts […]

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