Reading Time: 1 minute This is from the beautiful Ice Hotel in Sweden. Write about going there – would you enjoy it? Or is it more like a romantic getaway gone horribly wrong when you were secretly hoping for a secluded lodge with a wood-burning hot tub?! Want some feedback on your writing? Post in the comments or find me on twitter @miss_tiggr
Reading Time: 1 minute Want some feedback on your writing? Post in the comments or find me on twitter @miss_tiggr
Reading Time: 1 minute Write two hundred words: from the perspective of the shadowy figure on the bottom left – are they terrified and seeing this for the first time? Or are they a dragon-hunter, on a mission to reclaim the abandoned city from the monsters that now plague it? Are dragons ferocious, or simply a nuisance to be dealt with? at the top of the skyscraper, waiting for the dragon-bus to arrive. Where are you going, and what will you do when you get there? Is this a long-distance journey, the urban fantasy equivalent of an airship, or simply your morning commute? From …
Reading Time: 2 minutes I occasionally have a competition with my classes, to find a pair of words in English that have precisely the same denotation and connotation (which is a nice way to introduce those terms as well.) Basically, they provide pairs of words that they think are the same, and I explain why that’s not true. It builds competitiveness – especially when I get two classes going at the same time and they want to win first – and it gets them exposed to a wide range of language and meaning, as they start looking for ways to win! Although we …
Reading Time: 2 minutes Staring back at the world it seems remarkable that this is mankind’s crowning achievement. While other species scrabble in the dirt, living from biological impulse to biological impulse, we turned our attention to mastering first the earth around us and then the skies above us. We’re so used to seeing it from this distance, the pictures broadcast from satellites and the space stations, that we have known what our planet looks like. We have seen the lights clustering like swarming fireflies, storms gather, fires rage. From over two hundred miles away our astronauts sent back instantaneous photographs as if they …
Reading Time: 2 minutes Sing me a song. A song of beauty and starlight, a song that echoes through the universe and bounces off the stars, a song that haunts the shadows of the forests and revels in the midnight heat of the deserts. sing to me of the eternity of the mountains, the fleeting life of the dragonfly – is it endless to the creature in its midst? If we feel the mountains last for ever, are we as mountains to the mayfly that flits above the water for but a day? Sing me a melody of the water gushing from the earth, rustling, rattling, gurgling, …
