Write All Along

Just what the world needs: another blogger.

When I was a teenager I had a personal website that I made in iWeb (you had forgotten about iWeb, hadn't you?) called My Name is Eric. The logo had those words in a red stamp, just like the popular (20 years ago) TV show My Name is Earl.

In college I launched a blog because a local web design company called Blogiversity was trying to drum up content for their platform by awarding laptops to the most popular bloggers on their site. It was called "Eric: Unpublished" and I mostly provided riveting updates on my writing life such as the novel I was working and the rejection letters I was collecting. Wow. Not much has changed since then... I did win one of those laptops though.

While I'm still collecting rejection letters and I now have multiple novels in various stages of unpublish-ed-ness, I do have a handful of short stories out there in the world for folks to read and I'm proud of each and every one of them. I will continue to report on, boast over, and whine about my writing life in this new forum. However, I have some other content I plan to explore here, mainly of an educational nature.

I am now a veteran teacher of fifteen years with experience at every grade and level of high school ELA. I've got the M.Ed. and I did the NWP thing and I could probably rattle off a few more super impressive acronyms, but you know... stay humble. ✌️ Primarily, at this point, I teach electives. I'm the school's off-an-on journalism instructor/newspaper advisor, but I have a long history building two other programs at my site: Creative Writing and AP Seminar. While few high schools even offer creative writing electives anymore, I'm at the helm of a thriving program that takes up half my schedule and includes an illustrious literary journal: The Echo: Teen Art & Lit Mag, which is backed by an alumni founded and run 501c3 and accepts submissions internationally. So yeah... we're pretty cool.

I'm going to provide lesson plans here and also write about some of the other kewl stuff that I do in creative writing class. Maybe it'll help somebody. Maybe people will purchase my lessons on Teachers Pay Teachers. 🤷‍♂️

And then there's AP Seminar. Not to brag, but I'm kind of a bomb ass Sem fiend. Had a 100% pass rate last with near 60 students. Would've had a 100% two years ago if these two losers had TURNED IN THEIR PAPERS. I'm not letting that one go for a while. Regardless, I feel like I've figured AP Seminar out, and I plan to provide content to help teachers and students through that challenging and rewarding course. There will be lessons on Teachers Pay Teachers and some free ones too. There will be advice columns for students, and I will provide my contact info for anyone (teacher or student) who wants to schedule a coaching session.

Besides writing and teaching writing, my other thoughts may wind up on here as well, because why not. I don't believe too much in branding and I am so sure that we all contain multitudes. Topics I don't have plans to write about but may very well end up on this site include but are not limited to:

1. Legos
2. Suburban Sprawl
3. The Disney-fication of Star Wars
4. My deep affection for Bernie Sanders
5. Anything science fiction
6. Cheetos Puffs
7. Sci-fi Short Stories
8. Species Loss and the Mass Extinction Event that is the Anthropocene
9. When to capitalize words in a list
10. Sci-fi Movie Reviews
11. The goddamn electoral college
12. The latest sci-fi book I'm reading
13. What if, like, I just randomly did a few posts in the format of those annoying recipe blogs? But not like the joke where I had my murder plans in the skip-over-parts but actually just one post was how I make a beer batter on the fly and it was random but also 100% sincere?
14. The Legend of Zelda
15. The Green New Deal
16. Sci-fi tropes
17. the importance of reading to your kids
18. knowing when to stop a list