Let's play catch up.

Since we last joined our intrepid reader, she has been writing and reading way too much for her own good, but sharing? Not so much. It's time to correct that imbalance. So sit back, and get ready for a little bit of an update dump. But don't be afraid. I promise, it won't hurt. Much.

Thanks for stopping by.

Funny Story

So, I've been writing a lot lately. Just not *here.*
Here. ------>
In my little travel journal.

Frankly, poetry has felt very therapeutic lately. No, not that self-indulgent angst-fest that I wrote when I was a teenager. This isn't all complete drivel, but let's be honest, feeding creativity is healthy.
Anyway, part of the whole writing process is making a choice: keep it private or try to find a good home for it. I've been trying to home most of my work. Not the total drivel. It gets to live and die on my OneDrive.
Submitting writing involves cover letters. I hate them. You hate them. We all hate them. They always make me feel like a mouse squeaking at the wall. So yesterday, amidst a high stress moment of trying to not sound quite like a mouse, I decided to go an entirely different direction.
I swept caution back into the closet and asked myself what I would want to read if I were on the receiving end, and ended up dancing down the path of whimsy.
It was more or less polite nonsense, but nonetheless, I slipped it into the envelope (yes, honest to goodness envelope, like it's 1989) with more calm than I'd ever felt submitting anything.
I smiled and thought "even if they don't like my work, they'll enjoy the cover letter."

I don't know if I'll be bravely whimsical on subsequent cover letters, but man, just this once? It felt good.

So, before I go about shooting myself in my writing hand with future cover letters, what do you do to make you feel good about your cover letter?

Conventions

Photo by Darren Lewis

Here on earth, we don't capitalize it. Sure, Mars and Jupiter get a capital letter, but the convention is that earth doesn't. It bothers me. Earth, the spinning top of iron and water with this mostly-nitrogen but oxygen rich mist that infuses us with life, doesn't rate it's place with the proper nouns. It sets me on edge the same way that, at some point, someone decided that the plural of DVD and the myriad other acronyms somehow should include an apostrophe. When I read DVD's, all I see is something belonging to the DVD.*

Please forgive me when I insist that we live on Earth, which is covered in water, sand, earth and other things, and that here on Earth, people love their DVDs, CDs, and other data storage media. But don't forgive me for my Oxford commas, because I'm unapologetic in my support of the Oxford comma.

Let's start a list of the other writing conventions that make our teeth itch. Which irritate you most?

*Per my favorite style manual on plural abbreviations, "[t]he trend is away from using an apostrophe to pluralize an abbreviation." Hopefully that trend will hold. Diana Hacker, A Pocket Style Manual (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000), 70.