AOL Journal-land’s resident cartoonist, Dan Wheeler, has left the building.
Apparently someone found his comic strip, “Bobo Puppyhead,” offensive enough to raise a red flag to AOL. His comic strip, if you have never seen it, consisted of dialog and themes that were of an adult nature…but as far as I ever saw, the kind of “adult nature” that would have warranted a PG-13 rating if he was making a motion picture in today’s society. I never saw any sign of nudity, even when sex was being depicted. The title of …

I must explain an important rule about the Saturday Six: it is never “too late” to play. I call it the “Saturday Six” not because I expect everyone to drop what they’re doing and come here on Saturday…but because that’s the day when I post the questions. If you don’t get around to it until Monday or Tuesday, there’s no reason to feel guilty for being tardy…I’m just glad you decided to visit to begin with, and I hope you enjoy these weekly questions.
To play, you can …

There are two primary schools of thought when it comes to plotting your novel. One of them is that you should do a painstaking outline before you write chapter one, and in it you should include every major event in your novel, down to specific scenes you envision. “You wouldn’t plan a road trip,” the experts claim, “without picking up a map so you know exactly how to get there.” There’s a lot of validity in that line of reasoning, I suppose. But I’m not sure …

When was the last time you used an apostrophe? Do you recall? Do you remember why you used it?
We all make grammar mistakes. There are occasionally old entries that I edit months later to remove grammar problems or misspelled words. Call me anal-retentive when it comes to grammar and typos.
In that spirit, I hope you will forgive me for mentioning the proper way to use apostrophes. I regularly stumble across incorrect usage of them. When I read other people’s writing, there are …

We writers are supposed to write. We’re also supposed to read. And we must juggle both along with jobs, meals, friends, family, and the unexpected surprises that come up along the way.
I am amazed by people who can sit quietly and read an entire book in one sitting. I would have a nervous breakdown if I tried to do so. I wish I could, but I can’t sit still that long, no matter how enthralled I am with what I’m reading. I have to …

Have you ever been tempted to enroll in one of those writing classes you’ve seen advertised? If you pick up one of the writing magazines, you’ll find countless ads for schools ready to help you turn your idea into a bestseller.
Beyond that outrageous claim, do you have any experiences that you’d like to share? (You don’t have to mention schools by name…just what you got out of it, or what you wished you had.)
I’ll start the ball rolling with my own experience. I signed up …

I started my AOL writing journal (whose contents have since been merged here) when I joined the writing group, “What if…,” started by Andreakingme of “Unhinged” fame. Andrea is trying to write her own novel, and she’s under a rather brutal deadline now to get the first draft done. You can read about the deadline and how it came to be here.
Meanwhile, members of the group, as their first assignments, have been asked to do two things.
First, we should take a writing quiz which seeks to determine what kind of …

Time to play again! As we edge closer to two dozen sets of six, I have another surprise: for the second week in a row, there are two Reader’s Choice Questions!
To play you can either answer the questions in a comment here, or put the answers in an entry on your journal…but either way, leave a link to your journal so that everyone else can visit! (If possible, when you leave the link, please link to the actual entry. That saves me lots of time on …

Many of Bush’s critics (who happen to be, coincidentally, Kerry supporters), insist that Bush’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction are intentional lies. Since no weapons of mass destruction have been found, they say, and since Bush assured us they were there, this is proof that intentionally deceived the American people.
But if Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction, exactly when did the lying begin?
A news item in 2002 from a Glasgow newspaper reported the following information, which seems to show records of the earliest documented claims that …

How seriously do you take weather reports? When a major storm is on the way, do you prepare, or do you wait to see which path the storm is taking?
When you see what amounts to a consistent direction, do you assume that the storm — a purely natural occurrence that man has no way to control — will continue in that exact path without any deviation?
My closest friends live in St. Petersburg, so I had been watching the storm closely when I learned it was headed their way. …

Another week, another set of questions…six, to be exact. And this week, there is a surprise: TWO Reader’s Choice Questions! To play you can either answer the questions in a comment here, or put the answers in an entry on your journal…but either way, leave a link to your journal so that everyone else can visit! Enjoy!
1. So no one likes that “Favorite Gadgets” question on AOL’s Member Profiles. What would you replace it with?
2. How many credit cards do you have at the moment, …

There’s a new reason to hate Starbucks, say some mothers, and it has nothing to do with their coffee or their prices.
WJLA-TV in Washington, DC, reports that angry moms have been protesting stores there after a mother who decided to nurse her child inside a Maryland coffee shop was asked to either cover up or to nurse feed her baby in the ladies’ room.
Protestors claim that there is nothing shameful about breast feeding, that it is a perfectly natural thing. They claim that moms need to be able to …