The following post was written by Starre Vartan. Starre is one of the editors on Current Events magazine here at Weekly Reader and this is her first time blogging for Word ... but certainly not her last.

A.S. Byatt is a writer who really knows how to spin a yarn. In her short story collection from 2005, The Little Black Book of Stories, Byatt explores the world of dark fairy tales. Fanciful stories are not just for little kids anymore. They are a much overlooked genre of their own, like science fiction or mystery. Historically, fairy tales were meant to be cautionary or moral tales, not necessarily bedtime stories.

Like the original tales of the Brothers Grimm and the color fairy books (The Red Fairy Book, The Violet Fairy Book), the stories in the Little Black Book of Stories are not cute or necessarily pleasant, though some do have happy endings. Instead these stories are crafted with an eye towards understanding humanity through creative prose and a step-outside-of-normal unreality.

Why not try your hand at writing a fairy tale? Like Byatt, you can set your tale in the present day, or you could try a more traditional setting from the past. You can even write a futuristic fairy tale, like several of Margaret Atwood's novels.   

E.B. White's birthday is today. You know E.B. White, don't you? Come on! You read Charlotte's Web, right? Well, he wrote it. And you knew that. I know you did. Good job.

Well, you may be surprised to know that E.B. also co-wrote The Elements of Style with William Strunk Jr. This is a very tiny book but it is filled with some of the most explosive grammar advice this side of the Mississip! Seriously, if you thought grammar was fun before, just wait until you pick up this gem of a book! It will knock your socks off! I say this as a person who has had his socks knocked off before. It's a long story about a fire-breathing dragon and an evil sorcerer with a weird obsession with feet. I won't bore you with the details here. We're talkin' about grammar, baby! Yah! Bring it! And do you know what else? This book can fit in your back pocket! You can read it on the train! At the movies! Even swimming in the ocean or climbing Mount Everest! No more making excuses for skipping that trip to Mars this year! You've got The Elements of Style to make the journey all the more exciting!

The New York Times says, "Buy it, study it, enjoy it. It's as timeless as a book can be in our age of volubility."

What's volubility? I don't know! Let's look it up!

vol·u·ble  

1. Marked by a ready flow of speech; fluent.

Awesome! Yah! I knew that! I think. Maybe a long time ago. Maybe now? I don't know! Woo hoo! The point is that yes, we do live in an "age of volubility." Everyone uses big words and sharp sounding syllables. Listen up! Get a vocabulary! Work it! Yah!

Hey, I have a joke for you. What's the differerence between "regardless" and "irregardless"? Give up? About the same as the difference between "can't" and "cannot". Ah ha! Ahh ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Oh! Somebody stop me! Seriously, regard the irregardless on page 50 of William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White's masterpiece grammar phenomenon, The Elements of Style.

Be the first on your block to own The Elements of Style. Impress all your friends with nonrestrictive modifiers and auxillary verbs! Is some bully stealing your lunch money every day? Shove a sentence fragment in his face and then don't tell him why what you've said was grammatically wrong! It'll drive him nuts! Observe:

"Hey bully! Because muscle mattered slightly!"

"Huh?"

"Yah Yah Yah! Take that, you embodiment of future insecurities!"

Buy this book! Buy this book! Buy this book! Buy this book!

One more thing, here is a beautiful quote from E.B. White. He proclaimed it one time when he wasn't personifying barnyard animals or partying up the grammar world:

"All I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world."

Word.

Are you traveling this summer? Here's a nifty tip to keep the writer within you churning out ideas: send yourself a postcard each day!

I went to Europe for the first time this summer, and every day for the two weeks I was there, I sent a postcard to my address back home. The thought of writing an entire journal entry each day seemed too time-consuming with all the sight-seeing and and traveling I was doing, but I still wanted to remember every minute of my trip. Writing a postcard every day was the perfect solution. It was like a daily journal of my experiences, and because a postcard is so small, I was easily able to find five minutes to fill one up each day. I wrote down funny stories, snippets of dialogue, story ideas, descriptions of places or people I saw ... goldmines for future writing! And I chose pictures of places I had visited, so each postcard has an added bonus of being a visual reminder of my trip as well. 

A twist on this idea is if you are traveling and staying in touch with friends or family via e-mail, send the e-mail to your address, as well. That way, when you arrive back home, you will have an inbox full of "diary entries" in the form of letters back home. 

So you see, a vacation away from home doesn't have to be a vacation away from your writing life! :)

The following is a piece of my catalog of travels from the great state of Virginia to the great state of California, up the coast to Washington (also great), and then back east, back home. Nothing in this account has been embellished and/or fabricated. It all really and truly happened. For real. Seriously. I would not lie to you.

Sunday, June 11, 2006 (cont.)
MISSOURI

Gateway
Yay! We stopped for something cool! In St. Louis, we went to the Gateway Arch. Did you know you can go up into this thing? Well you can, and we did.

We went up the north side of the arch in a tram that was really a cable car but looked like a space pod. There was very little room inside and I hit my head on the roof going in. Three minutes later, we were at the top. And I hit my head coming out. Brilliant.

At the top of the arch, we had a pretty good view of St. Louis (and also a little vertigo). The wall slants up so you can lean forward on it. When you put all your weight on top of it and look straight down, you feel as if the whole thing is going to crumble right underneath you and ... "Ahhhhhhhhhhh! I regret nothinnnnnngggggg!!!!" Yeah well, that didn't really happen.

So we hung out at the top for a little while and took our silly pictures and then headed down in the south side tram. I hit my head getting in and out of the car again. Dan laughed. It wasn't funny.

Down below the arch, we sat down and looked out onto the river as ferryboats and large barges passed by. Down by the dock, they were playing Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" over the loudspeakers. And I finally started to feel that we were out here, seeing the country. Ohhhh yeahhhh.

Mark Twain Caverns
Argh! If I have learned nothing so far on this cross country trip, I have learned this: you have to pay attention. We saw a sign for Mark Twain Caverns and I nearly jumped out of my seat. Out of all the caverns we passed (and trust me, there have been a lot of them), this was the one I had to see. Perhaps I would catch a glimpse of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County or maybe see Huck pulling a fast one over an unsuspecting riverboat captain. I don't know how likely that would be in a cave, but the possibility was certainly there more than it would be in, let's say, Shenandoah Caverns. Alas, we missed the exit. In fact, I didn't even know which exit it was. By the time I finally dug out the map of Missouri and found the caverns, we were 20 miles past it. And, being on a schedule, we could not turn around. Sigh. If nothing else, at least I learned my lesson. My eyes are peeled now--to coin a nasty phrase.

Sidenote: Did you know that Mark Twain is not Mark Twain's real name? It's actually Samuel Clemens. The real question is, why did Mr. Clemens write under the pseudonym? Can you figure it out?

We drove north through Iowa for 15 minutes and then west into Nebraska. That is all.

Nebraska is all right, man. We stayed in Lincoln last night and we've been driving through a lot of farmland all morning. We've passed about 14,000 cows and 1 donkey. Everything is very green here. Houses on Route 80 are few and far between, and that's an understatement. This is farm country, baby! This is where your food comes from. Thank a farmer.

Friends and Strangers
Anyone out there from Friend, Nebraska? Drop us a line. Tell us what life is like. Are there any jerks in Friend? Do you run them out on a rail? I'm guessing if there are, you don't. That wouldn't be very friendly. Hey, maybe we can make a pen pal connection between Friend, Nebraska and Low Moor, West Virginia.

"Thank you, whoever you are. I've always relied on the kindness of strangers." That's the final line from A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. I don't know why I thought of it just now except that a friend is just a stranger you haven't met. No wait, scratch that, reverse it. It's a fantastic play. If it's not at a theater near you anytime soon, you should really buy the book. And then, after you've read it, you should definitely check out the classic movie adaptation starring Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando in their prime. Streetcar takes place in New Orleans though and has nothing at all to do with Nebraska. I'm all over the map today. See you in Colorado.

Next stop ... well, no big surprise here, it's Colorado. Duh.