by Sue Horner | Jul 17, 2019 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Who doesn’t love a slice of deliberately bad writing? Yes, word nerds, gather ’round. It’s time to celebrate the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest, “where ‘www’ means ‘wretched writers welcome.’” The contest awards the best of the worst opening sentences, or what the...
by Sue Horner | Apr 18, 2018 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Maybe “The Weed Store” was taken. For years, beer drinkers in Ontario bought their 12-packs and two-fours at an outlet called Brewers Retail. Unofficially, people called it “the beer store,” and The Beer Store it officially became in a 1985 rebranding. Now the...
by Sue Horner | Apr 6, 2017 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Post-it notes were flying in last night’s session on creative problem-solving. Trevor McAlpine of Synergetic Management had members of IABC/Toronto’s Professional Independent Communicators covering the Post-its with ideas in a fast-paced session on creativity. The...
by Sue Horner | Feb 9, 2017 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
I must have run across Roger von Oech at an IABC conference years ago. He’s an author and inventor who has been giving seminars, workshops and presentations on creativity since 1977, although he doesn’t specifically point to IABC on his website. His name came to light...
by Sue Horner | Oct 6, 2016 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
As my friend Sue once said, “Every time I start to lose a little faith in my fellow human beings, along come the Bulwer-Lytton awards.” This annual celebration of the best of the worst is the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Writers apply their talents to...
by Sue Horner | Aug 13, 2012 | Most popular posts, The Red Jacket Diaries blog
It was a dark and stormy night… So begins Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Paul Clifford, the inspiration for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. In tribute, the contest gives awards for the “opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels,” or...
by Sue Horner | Jun 9, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
There’s something so appealing about humour, I don’t know why people feel the need to be stuffy. An online posting led me to Woot, an e-store and community that sells “cool stuff cheap.” One look at the job postings shows you this crew has a...
