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shared by John Lemke on 06 Apr 14 - No Cached

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shared by John Lemke on 13 Apr 14 - No Cached

People who experience early childhood trauma, like abuse or war, often exhibit a number of hormonal imbalances. The mechanisms involved are poorly understood, but most scientists agree that traumatic events alter gene expression, which then causes misregulations in a number of biological processes. But whether these changes can actually be passed down to offspring is a controversial question, because it would imply that acquired traits — traits that aren't actually encoded in DNA, but rather arise following certain experiences — are somehow being passed down through generations.
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After the pups of the traumatized male mice were born, scientists monitored their behavior. As expected, these pups showed the same symptoms of trauma that their fathers did, despite having never undergone traumatic events themselves. And these symptoms were even apparent in a third generation of mice.
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When researchers looked at the sperm of the traumatized mice, they discovered that the microRNAs in these sperm cells were also present in abnormally high numbers. "This means that germ cells — sperm in males and oocytes in females — are very sensitive to environmental conditions in early life," Mansuy says, "and early childhood trauma has consequences not only for the brain but also for the germ cell line
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shared by John Lemke on 13 Apr 14 - No Cached

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shared by John Lemke on 12 Apr 14 - No Cached

Take that advice beyond the beginning stages, though, and what you get are stories that really should move the reader but don’t, either because the emotions are all related from the outside or because the narrative doesn’t provide the sort of dense, information-rich substrata upon which complex characters are built.
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Which leads me to my second point: Your story is about Gina, at forty, deciding whether or not to leave her boyfriend. Are you really going to spend half your story showing us Gina’s white-trash childhood in Elbridge, Michigan (a key bit of backstory)? Or are you just going to cut to the chase, provide a few key details, and move on?
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But push this advice too far, and again, you’ll get stuck writing mediocre fiction. Because sometimes the things that don’t work are actually important. They don’t work not because they’re the wrong things, but because they’re the hard, ambitious, at-the-very-edge-of-what-you-even-know-how-to-say-things, and the only way to land them is to dig deeper, work harder, and sometimes even (god help you) add rather than cut.
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To keep advancing you have to stretch your limits. And sometimes that means writing from the point of view of someone who is super not you.
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Language is your Swiss army knife, and you can’t do shit like this with just the knife and the corkscrew.
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shared by John Lemke on 11 Apr 14 - No Cached

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shared by John Lemke on 11 Apr 14 - No Cached

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shared by John Lemke on 11 Apr 14 - No Cached

The Chicago Manual of Style prescribes spelling out United States as a noun in running text and reserving US for the adjective form only. CMOS also prefers US without periods, to match the US postal codes like AR, MI, and WY.
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The AP Stylebook recognizes U. S. as a noun as well as an adjective. It calls for periods when the U.S. appears in a running text, but US without periods in a headline.
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When it comes to formal speaking and written text, however, reserve the abbreviation for adjectival use and write out United States as the noun.
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shared by John Lemke on 10 Apr 14 - No Cached

Unless they see the value of joining your list, they simply won’t invest any of those valuable minutes in you and your blog.
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Do something for me and I’ll do something for you. In this case, the bribe is “give me your email address and I’ll give you something that isn’t freely available on my blog.”
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Minimum requirements: Useful and engaging content, whether unique to the bribe or already published on your blog, that you can easily break into pieces. On the technical side, you’ll need an email newsletter service (e.g. Mailchimp, AWeber (aff), etc.) with an autoresponder feature ($10-20/month).
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Minimum requirements: A word processor like Microsoft Word, Apple Pages or OpenOffice Writer is sufficient for creating a simple cheat sheet, but for a more sophisticated end product, you might require a desktop publishing package such as Adobe InDesign, Microsoft Publisher, or QuarkXPress. Alternatively, you can use a cheat sheet tool like Cheatography to generate cheat sheets based on a default template.
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Minimum requirements: Your chosen word processor is enough to create a basic template, but to make it even more visually appealing, consider using some simple design elements such as colors, backgrounds and borders. If the template is meant to be printed, you can convert your .docx or .pages file into a downloadable PDF for your readers’ convenience.
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