Inaugural Parade 2012 for President Ma in Tan Tzu Shiang

Parade! Parade! Parade!

I was in yet another parade this week in celebratory Taiwan! This is my third parade in as many years! Aren’t I awesome?

(Now, if you’ve never been to Taiwan, if you’re from the States, you’re probably thinking, “Wow! How exciting! What has Jess done to earn such honors? What group has she joined since arriving there?" You’re probably thinking of the pomp of blocked streets and barricades and all that, right?)

The reality is… in Taiwan, parades are usually just a run-of-the-mill common place. Roads aren’t blocked off and police walk with the groups or drive scooters, pausing at stoplights and moving with normal traffic. People still stop and watch the drums and fireworks, but life, more or less, plods along as usual. And even drivers just move along behind the parade, or, if you have a scooter, you drive along side the noise until you can get out ahead of it. The last parade I was in, my sister Amber was with me, but we didn’t have a camera. This time I took some video.

Sketchbook Pro for iPad

I have always enjoyed drawing and doodling, and I've been wanting to find a way to do comics for my blogs, but it's difficult with all the scanning of hardcopies and with all the software or apps for my computer being too difficult to use (because of the awkwardness of using a mouse or a trackpad).


but... using my trusty iPad and the app Sketchbook Pro for iPad I made several things very quickly even though I am still new to using the program.


The first thing I made was a picture for my other blog Books With Benefits. This blog, as you can tell from the image, is a collaboration with my friend April. We decided to combine our mutual love of Love stories and our mutual Master's degrees in English to talk about novels, movies, manga, etc. On this site we review books, offer maps of book series, write editorials about anything in the romance genre that pleases us, and make funny meme-ish things like comics.

by JW

The next thing I made was a silly image for a post I wrote on my other-other blog How I Survive the Undead Unculture. This blog is designed to help folks read the world. There is so much insanity and un-thinking in the world, but I am trying to stop the mindless horde by posting editorials about the crazy things I see and by teaching folks how to read--books, films, and culture. My most recent post is How To Read Literature (and write a thesis): Cinderella.

I'm Not Bitter! My Dear Friend, Bitter Sam

Well, as you all probably know, in my spare time—ha ha ha (what teacher really has that?)—I have been working on several projects all at once: TED-Ed scripts, several novels, blogs and websites, etc. And I work hard, but…

Let’s be honest. Shall we? 

Event the most scrupulous of writers… the most dedicated of craft-disciplined scribes… have those moments when they just… drift away from their writing. We are beckoned to by sirens who sing whatever tune we wish to hear. For some, it’s social media—Oh, Pinterest, you thief of time, or Twitter or Facebook or my own dear, innocent-seeming e-mail account. Others are called to by our dogs, like Amy Tan and her puppy pal Bombo. For me, it’s different things, but recently I’ve been taking little breaks and playing some Bitter Sam. Bitter Sam is a game designed by Moon Active. 

The Most Important Thing For Your Writing

A chair. That's right, a chair.

Writers spend an inordinate amount of time in chairs. Sometimes a painful amount of time in chairs. Sometimes a crippling amount of time in chairs. We're drafting, editing, blogging, e-mailing, fact-checking, and doing work for our various "real" jobs, many of which include some writing, too. All of this adds up to a potentially lethal amount of sitting.

Adventure: NaNoWriMo: Is it good for ESL and ELL students?

A few months back, I reported that my students and I were taking on the NaNoWriMo challenge.


On November 1, we set out as a group to write 422,554* words in one month.


I was to write 50,000 words and my students, 11th and 10th grade students whose native language is Chinese and who are ELL students, aimed their sites on drafting 372, 554 English words for their own original stories. They did not start or even plan their novels before November 1, yet their individual goals ranged from 10,000 to 50,000 words. So. How did they do?