My Twenty Sixteen was chaotic,
An interesting twelvemonth at best.
There were times when I felt in control,
And times I was put to the test.
I managed my greatest achievement
Through months of a studying spree,
‘Til at last I defended my thesis
And earned me a Master’s degree!
Though in writing I’ve always been active,
I found it was hard to keep pace.
With my thesis, my blog, and my novels,
This year’s been a creative race!
November by far closed the hardest
Of modern political years,
As I spent the eighth shaking profusely
And woke the next morning in tears.
Yet I’ve braved the emotion and chaos,
And I’m ready to start fresh and clean.
Let’s just hope it gets better from now on!
Have a Happy Twenty Seventeen!
Happy New Year to all my family, friends, and readers! I hope you had a pleasant 2016, and that you all have a wonderful 2017!
Welcome to the last creative writing post of 2016! It’s been a pretty crazy year, and while it may not have been the best for many people, my “Year in Review” has some of my proudest achievements yet! Following last year’s format, my final 2016 Wednesday post is a review of my resolutions from the beginning of the year. Enjoy, and Happy New Year!
Did I complete that Master’s thesis on time?
Yes and no. While I did have to request a couple of extensions, I at least managed to complete my thesis within the year to meet a defense deadline in September. After revising it a final time and submitting it to my school library last month, my next goal is to complete the paper for submission to a scientific journal next year. Here’s hoping I can meet my next deadline in 2017!
Did I expand my blogging network?
Yes! While I’m not exactly pulling in thousands of readers a day yet, I did meet some new writers through WordPress and get a lot more networking done this year than last. I commented on more blog posts, shared several articles I enjoyed, and even participated in blogging events! I look forward to meeting even more writers in the year to come!
Did I start monetizing my writing?
Not quite, but I’m on track. I didn’t sell any articles or win any story contests this year, but I did sign up for Fiverr and just got approved by Google AdSense this month. I’ve already started placing ads on my blog, and you can expect to hear about my new freelance writing and editing services soon. Now that I’m done with school (for now), hopefully 2017 will prove to be a much more fruitful year for my writing career!
What about you? What have you learned about writing in 2016? I hope you had a productive year, and that your 2017 will be even better! Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year!
Definition: relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief
It’s finally the end of 2016, and while I usually take this final week to write about an uplifting word to close the year’s Word of the Week segment, this year I decided to shake things up by featuring Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year. After a long and tumultuous year in which emotions have run high and too much fake news has been mixed in with real news, it’s really no surprise that a relevant vocabulary word was chosen to sum it all up. Regardless of which side of history you find yourself on, one thing is certain: we’ve already long been living in a “post-truth” world!
“Post-truth” is a political term that refers to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to personal belief and emotion. The word comprises the prefix “post” (in the sense “belonging to a time in which the specified concept has become unimportant or irrelevant”) and the noun “truth” (“the state of being true”). The term in its current definition was likely coined in 1992 by the Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich, having first appeared in an essay he wrote for The Nation magazine, while the contemporary phrase “post-truth politics” surfaced in 2010 in a Grist magazine column by blogger David Roberts.
Simply put, “post-truth” politics is a political culture in which facts are not as important as feelings. While some people and media outlets contest and falsify truth, “post-truth” refers to a phenomenon in which truth is rendered of secondary importance to appeals to emotion. The term is considered contemporary and is largely associated with social media, though the concept likely dates much farther back than the Internet; George Orwell, for example, incorporated the idea of a “post-truth” state in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. If the characters in your stories tend to let truth take a back seat to emotion, you may already be creating a “post-truth” world of your own!
What are your thoughts on this word? Any suggestions for future “Word of the Week” featured words?
‘Tis the season that ends another year,
A time we celebrate the Lord above.
The air is filled with warm holiday cheer
As families rejoice and share their love.
Evergreen trees are dressed in colored light
As door to door, the caroling choirs roam.
Outside, the falling snow paints the world white
While presents are exchanged in every home.
Children rush to the frosty windows quick
To try to see the magic reindeer fly,
Pulling the sleigh of Jolly Old Saint Nick,
Making his yearly trip across the sky.
God bless us all with peace in every way.
I wish you all a Merry Christmas Day!
Merry Christmas to all my family, friends, and readers who are celebrating! May you all have a blessed weekend and a wonderful holiday season!
With the holiday season upon us and Christmas just around the corner, it’s time for another Christmas-themed blog post! Last year I shared a list of my top ten Christmas songs, but there are so many songs I love that I decided to share a few more this year. Nothing like some good Christmas music to get you into the holiday spirit!
So just for fun, here are five more Christmas songs I love listening to around this time of year. Enjoy, and Happy Holidays!
Note: this post contains embedded YouTube videos. If you’re reading this in your email, you may need to open the page on my blog to see them.
It’s not really the holiday season until you’re hearing the A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack everywhere you go. Last year I started my list with “O Tannenbaum“, while this year I’m going with the more iconic “Linus and Lucy”. Everyone knows this one for the famous Peanuts dance scene, right? It’s a Christmas classic!
Okay, maybe this one is a bit grim for Christmas, but it takes me back to my childhood, so I love it anyway! I’m sure most of us have seen How The Grinch Stole Christmas! at least once, and we all know this famous theme song. If you happen to know a real-life Grinch or two, this song is for you!
Yes, I know I shared this song last year too, but this version from Merry Christmas, Mr. Bean is too awesome to leave out of this list! Conducting the Salvation Army band evidently comes naturally to Mr. Bean; this is easily one of my favorite remixes of this classic Christmas carol!
Here’s another song I picked up from Merry Christmas, Mr. Bean! This one is sung by a chorus of caroling children, and it’s nothing short of angelic. One of the cutest scenes in the whole special!
Another well-known song from How The Grinch Stole Christmas!, “Welcome Christmas” covers the other side of the famous children’s story. The Whos understand about the Christmas spirit what the Grinch has yet to learn, a lesson Dr. Seuss so eloquently sums up in a few lines:
And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before!
“Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come from a store.
Now there’s a lesson we can all stand to be reminded of every holiday season! The company of loved ones is what truly makes a very Merry Christmas!
Bonus: if you like your holidays to be as politically correct as possible, you may get a kick out of Jon Cozart’s ridiculously hilarious Progressive Christmas Carols video. Enjoy, and have a Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah/Joyous Kwanzaa!
What about you? What are your favorite holiday songs, Christmas or otherwise?
J.C. Wolfe is a fiction writer, biologist, and aspiring novelist of science fantasy and romance. A natural-born American and graduate in Marine Ecology from a university in Brazil, J.C. now writes for a living in California while spending free time blogging and penning stories and poetry.
J.C. Wolfe is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
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