Much more than tomato/tomahto

Today's 100 words:

I used to live in Western Nebraska, where I taught English and journalism at a college on the plains, an area so different from where I grew up. I remember talking about a forest one day in my composition class, and when I said the word "woods," I was met with blank faces. My students weren't familiar with the term, one that was such a part of my own life growing up in tree-filled Upper Michigan. Even after I defined the word, I'm not certain they truly understood, showing that our comprehension does depend somewhat on where we're from.

And all is (finally) well

Yesterday I finally got over whatever it was that was preventing me from starting my WIP. Now that I'm over that hurdle, I think the rest of the story will follow much more easily.

It's funny... One of the courses I taught as a college instructor was composition. Students would often come to me with complaints about how much difficulty they were having starting their essays. My advice was always the same: start somewhere else in the essay and go back to the beginning later. For some, this method worked. The rest insisted that they couldn't write anything unless they had a good beginning, and they would struggle until they finally hit upon an idea. I, as evidenced by many of these blog posts, fall into this second category. This is one case where I just can't practice what I preach.