If you’re within playgoing distance of the Valley Players theater in Waitsfield, Vermont (about 45 minutes from Burlington, 30 minutes from Barre/Montpelier, or 20 minutes from Waterbury), you’ll be interested to hear about the Vermont Playwrights Circle fourth annual Ten-Fest of ten 10-minute plays by ten local authors:

Divora Zipkin’s “Blood Ties”
Lesley Becker’s “Road Map to Victory”
Lars Nielsen’s “The Night Letter”
Jeanne Beckwith’s “Be Sixteen”
Brett Cox’s “Consider the Services of the Departed”
Charles Coburn’s “A Pause to Remember”
Margot Lasher’s “Stay”
Em Frappier’s “I’m So Disapointed in You”
Terri Kneen’s “Lost and Found”

and my own “The Discovery of Fire and Other Bad Ideas,” an epic tale (well, maybe the 10-minute version of “epic”) of invention and jealousy among stereotypical cavepeople and their marketing consultant, Steve.

Thursday Aug 18 – Saturday Aug 20 at 8:00 PM
Sunday Aug 21 at 2:00 PM
$10 general admission
$8 seniors and students
Valley Players in Waitsfield
more information and directions:
www.vermontplaywrightscircle.org or www.valleyplayers.com
RESERVATIONS: 802-583-1674
For a live person, call Charlie at: 802-479-2136

My writer friend Maya Lassiter’s blog is a strange, entertaining, and enlightening thing, full of careening children, lovely goats, and writing-the-current-book-no-matter-what-it-takes-dammit. Recently she wrote about her formerly meek self, how she became a spitfire, and how that backfired on her once she had children. Some of it sounded familiar to me; it might to you too. Check out her post, “going all erin brockovich on your ass” on her site at mayalassiter.com.

Dr. Grasshopper has a marvelous blog about starting out as a young doctor (no, it’s not exactly like Scrubs) and about helping writers understanding medicine, health, and the human body: it’s called “How to Kill Your Imaginary Friends.”

In today’s post, Dr. Grasshopper reminds us to please, please not be a dumba**: see a doctor if your body is acting funny. Alternatively, the post could be considered to be an explanation of how to die unnecessarily at the age of 46 (just a few years older than me). Please read it, for yourself or for a dumba** you love: “Still Alive. I Am, At Least.“.

Men (latrophobes particularly), Dr. Grasshopper is particularly talking to us.

Photo by musical photo man

The following is not an actual advertising campaign, but it should be. It’s the work of copywriter Matt Kapler, of whom I sadly know very little except that I admire his style. I hope you enjoy this brief digression.

I admit, my math and science chops are not good enough that I always understand former NASA scientist and full-time web comic artist Randall Munroe’s xkcd–but as fiction, I love this installment:

And I love that it made this happen:

http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/48208-wisdom-of-crowds/

And I love that there were pictures:

Photos by atbash and kernelslacker.

This has little to do with willpower or with writing, but it’s worthwhile regardless. Here’s something I read on the site XKCD.com the other day:

"Misconceptions," from the Web comic XKCD.com

Reading it, I was of course intrigued and went straight to the Wikipedia article on “Common Misconceptions,” mainly to see if there could possibly be anything there I didn’t know. Which, uh, there was. A couple of highlights:

• Napoleon wasn’t particularly short
• Pilgrims didn’t wear buckles on their shoes and hats
• Scientists do in fact understand how a bumblebee can fly
• Different flavors are not detected solely on separate areas of the tongue

A couple of these were things I only learned recently (like the lemmings thing, though I had suspected that was made-up for a long time. There’s a gruesome fact in there about Disney, though). One (“People do not use only ten percent of their brains”) is something I’ve blogged about on this site. Highly recommended reading!

On a related subject, in case you don’t already know about it, I’d like to recommend Snopes.com for any time you question an urban legend or get an e-mail that you think might be a hoax. Snopes.com is the one site that I can think of that is so useful that I am willing to go there even though it features a lot of annoying pop-up ads.