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With the end of the school year comes the summer reading list: the list of books that students will be tested on in the fall. The specific books obviously vary from school to school, but during my stint as a high school teacher, the summer reading list always faced the same challenges. Our department would argue about the purpose of summer reading, and we would end up standing divided, each with certain books in our corner.

While some of my colleagues struggled to find selections that were both 1) not adapted into movies and 2) not on Sparknotes, that generally limited the choices, and seemed wrong to me. It usually resulted in summer reading becoming a pointless assignment, with no real connection to the coursework in the coming year. It also did little to foster a love of reading for the students. It was a punishment assignment: a reminder that they weren’t free from the grasp of school.

Because for many students, the cycle of summer reading was the same: cramming it all in before a test, downloading study guides, or writing a vague essay that could be about any book.

Taking photos of food is easy! Especially compared to photographing people. Food doesn’t talk back or move around. It just sits there looking delicious, waiting for you to find its best angle. Food never complains that you are making it look fat or ugly, and it never insists that you play death metal during the photo shoot.

Don’t let all those gorgeous shots in cookbooks and on the internet intimidate you! Here are some tips to making successful food photos, whether you’re cozy at home or out at a restaurant, street fair, luau, or anywhere with good food.

(Image via Flickr)

There’s a plague decimating the English language…or syllables of it, anyway. Perfectly good words are getting lopped off at the knees to make those cute-n-compact truncations known as abbreves (i.e., abbreviations, though I’m sure you could have figured that out). Yet for every person who finds them totes adorbs, there is obvi another person who thinks they sound less than profesh.

And while you might think that you’re one of those people fighting the good fight, sounding out every last syllable of gorgeous and family, word shortening takes no vacays. In fact, you probs have used one today without even realizing it. Here are six words that were abbreves before abbreving was cool. Go fig.

I am trying to write a 50,000-word novel by the end of the month. So are a few thousand other people in the Camp NaNoWriMo program. Why? The reasons vary. I suspect brain damage to be very high on the list.

And yet, I find myself hating the experience only about 75% as much as I thought I would. In fact, so far I’ve found it to be quite enlightening. Because the pressure to vomit out a thousand words or so every day has driven me to develop a number of, well, let’s call them “techniques” that help keep the ol’ word count ticking upwards. These are just variations on time-honored methods that great authors have used throughout history, but not everybody knows about them (I didn’t). So I thought I’d share them here, in the hopes that they’ll help you add bulk to your next big writing project, whatever it might be.

One of my favorite Philadelphia traditions is held during the Bastille Day festival when a drag portrayal of Marie Antoinette stands high atop Eastern State Penitentiary throwing TastyKakes and saying, “Let them eat cake.”

Now for those of you I haven’t completely lost due to maximum Philadelphia reference saturation level or historical inaccuracy (blah blah blah, ‘Let them eat cake has been accreddited to many high ranking women before Marie Antoinette, blah blah blah), there are plenty of ways to celebrate Bastille day without leaving an air conditioned space.

Photos by Marian Hammond

William Shakespeare’s Star Wars came out July 2^nd, one week before my birthday, and what a week it was—lots of fun press, a great book release at Powell’s and a great party afterward (featuring the world’s best cake courtesy of the world’s best spouse), watching the online buzz grow, and so on.

I thought I’d hit the high Monday the 8^th, when Google Trends Manager Kevin Allocca appeared on the Today show and named my little book as the reason why Google had seen an upturn in searches for “Star Wars” over the weekend.  But then, later that day, my editor Jason Rekulak from Quirk Books called me and told me there was a decent chance I would end up on the New York Times bestseller list.

Wait, what?