This. Changes. Everything. — Mitri the Scribe was once the highest-paid servant of Pharaoh Unas in the 24th century BC. He was the guy you went to if you wanted a temple built, or a letter written, or if you needed a funny idea for a personalized license plate. Now he sits in the…

Check in with your audience and avoid shouting into the void — According to a study by Microsoft, humans now have an attention span of eight seconds. Eight seconds! Don’t ask me for details on the study, I only skimmed it. And please don’t click away to that study link, I only included it so you’d believe me. Anyway, if you’ve made…

All we have is the past. — Dementia. I wake it up, I cook its meals, I put on its bib, I zip its zippers, tug on its shoes, adjust its pillows and blankets and hats and sleeve length, only for it to plant its feet and re-adjust until it’s satisfied. I take the salt shaker out…

Inventing the Sci-Fi genre at age 18 required a radical upbringing. This all started because my sister bought me a stunning, green and gold-leafed, vintage-inspired copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman for my birthday. With whispers in the press of Roe v. Wade about to…

And why it matters in the age of anti-abortion, nuclear threats, and civil rights — As long as I’ve been alive, my family’s told the same story about a single event that had to happen in order for me to be born. And it's not the night of my parents' engagement when they giddily threw caution to the wind and fooled around without contraceptives. The…

Please allow me to update you on "My Incredible Success" I made $613.11 in my first consistent month as a paid contributor due to two popular articles -one about how the Statues in Egypt Used to Have Eyeballs, and another which was a satirical article called, If You’re Not A…

The trickster archetype narrator and how to utilize it. — “How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.” ― Carl Gustav Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul Everybody wants to be liked. We want to be the heroes of our own…

A travel writing exercise and fan cross-over. Woman in the Garden This piece is going to be different from my usual historical pieces. Normally, I'd tell you some tale about Monet himself, the history of his house and gardens, etc. But today, in the spirit of the impressionist art movement, I thought I'd experiment…

The inevitability (and responsibility) of getting swept up in another country’s politics. — Two years ago, I stood on my apartment balcony in Barcelona, Spain, and watched a group of 40–50 young people with dark clothes and bandanas tied around their faces as they dragged every nearby dumpster from the sidewalks to the middle of the crosswalks and set them on fire. …