Talk Like a Pirate Day: Why the Joke Survived
A private joke between two friends in 1995 became an international observance in 2002. I drove to a pirate faire for it once, in the worst costume present.
Tag: September
Writing and book holidays observed in September, as autumn arrives. Every literary celebration, author day, and reading observance falling in September, each marked with an essay.
HistoryVJ Day: The Record That Only Exists Because Somebody Wrote It Down
The surrender took about twenty minutes aboard the USS Missouri. My grandfather had been a prisoner for three years and four months, and the record of it survives only because he sat down afterward and rebuilt it from memory.
Character DevelopmentNational Comic Book Day: Iron Man, FOOM, and the Seeds I Never Sold
National Comic Book Day celebrates the medium that taught a lot of us to love stories. I owned early Iron Man and Spider-Man issues, lost them all, and once trashed boxes of comics, and learned from all of it.
Crime FictionAgatha Christie Day: The Queen of Crime and the Mysteries I’m About to Write
Agatha Christie became the best-selling novelist in history, behind only the Bible and Shakespeare. She created Poirot and Miss Marple, and her mastery of plot is on my mind as I'm about to write mysteries of my own.
AI OverrelianceNational Punctuation Day: Learn the Rules Before AI Forgets Them For You
National Punctuation Day fights sloppy punctuation, and the marks are having a strange moment. A case for learning the rules cold before AI quietly forgets them for you, and why they still matter.
Jules VerneH.G. Wells Day: The Other Father of Science Fiction
H.G. Wells founded the opposite half of science fiction from Verne. Where Verne loved the machine, Wells used the impossible to hold a mirror to humanity. A look at the divide that still runs through the genre.
Reading LifeLabor Day
Labor Day is the first Monday in September. An honest take on the holiday and the writing angle in it: writing is real labor, most of it invisible.
Character DevelopmentHobbit Day
Hobbit Day is September 22. What Tolkien's hobbits teach about character and worldbuilding, an honest take from a writer who never read The Hobbit.
AudiobookNational Library Card Signup Month: A Writer’s Best Free Resource
September is National Library Card Signup Month. Why every writer needs a library card and how libraries shaped one author's career.
AmericaSeptember 11th: A Writer’s Tribute
A personal remembrance of September 11, 2001, the day that changed everything, and why the stories from that day must continue to be told.
AudiobookNational Read a Book Day: A Writer Who Reads Everything
September 6 is National Read a Book Day. A 113-book author on why reading is the single most important thing a writer does besides writing.
Character DevelopmentStar Trek Day: What the Original Series Taught Me About Storytelling
A lifelong Star Trek fan with over 200 hardcover Trek novels on what the original series got right about storytelling that most of its successors missed.