Hello and welcome
What did you get for Christmas?
I received the perfect gift for a writer . . . a box of story cubes.
Says the promo line on the cover, let your imagination roll wild.
Story Cubes contains nine cubes, and there's a picture or image on every surface of each cube.
Nine cubes.
Fifty-four images.
Ten million possible combinations . . . maybe more.
So you can't get writer's block with this game.
What you do is chuck the cubes out onto a table or your desk, then look at the nine images that roll face up and compose a story around them.
Click on the Short Stories tab and I'll give you a demonstration, a demonstration that resulted in my January short story for you—"My Worst New Year's Eve Ever . . . Really, Ever."
A mountain of books
Can you believe it?
You and friends around the country have sent us more than 7,000 books that the soldiers of the Hartford, Wisconsin, Army National Guard unit will take with them next month when they ship out for training, then a hitch in Afghanistan.
"I've got more than 100 boxes of books in the back of my store, waiting for the Guard truck to come get them," Martha Merrell's Bookstore owner Norm Bruce told me the other day.
"When Allan Ansorge approached me on doing this, he said we'd be lucky to get 500 books. I told him, 'Hey, you're thinking only 10 percent.'"
Norm was right.
The Books for Soldiers project he, Allan and fellow mystery writers Bill Rapp, Deb Baker, and I have been pushing for two months has brought in bags and boxes and cartons of books, guaranteeing the Hartford troops lots of great reads on their downtime.
Thank you.
Deaths and murder in a coal mine
New York Times reporter Gardiner Harris wrote a mystery—to date his only book—about life and death in a Kentucky coal mine.
It's a fascinating story. Click on the Featured Writer tab to read it.
© Jerry Peterson. Web site by interbridge.
