Alison's Journal

Someone just pointed to me this quiz about what type of rubber duck you are. I am apparently an:


Er...I think that's another way of saying I'm an "odd duck"! But I can live with that. And inventing stories (often odd ones) is indeed what I do. Along the same lines, the What's Your Writing Style? quiz told me:


"Individualistic with sense for the different and challenging, Walt Whitman and his poetry lacking meter and rhyme is just what the doctor ordered. You're quick to write something that the rest of the world doesn't accept as poetry, quick to separate yourself from the average joe.* An author with a true sense of self, you have confidence in your abilities and aren't afraid to show it." Again with the odd duck stuff! Not that that's news to me.

I have no writing news. No acceptances. No rejections. No new publications. No breakthroughs. One new submission, but that's not exactly news. Is no news good news? I don't know, but even if it is, I'd still rather have some more obvious good news!

* Note the blatant use of what my friend Joe Kissell calls "Joeism," as seen in discriminatory phrases such as average Joe, Joe Schmo, Joe Blow, etc. That example even puts "joe" in lower case, making the name so average it's generic. (And despite my individualism, I admit that my use of an asterisk in a blog entry is shamelessly stolen--er, I mean, flatteringly imitated--from Cynthia Leitich Smith. I'd love it if online help-style pop-ups were available for parenthetical remarks and links, but in their absence, a good old-fashioned footnote does the job!)