Seems like everyone is baking lately. We have been making lots of bread in my house, and not surprisingly, cinnamon buns!

My daughter, the original cinnamon baby, is an avid baker and my son Sam, the little boy in The Pirate's Bed, is an avid photographer--so, they got together and made this stop motion. I helped out by being an avid eater.

Try this prompt for writing based on the memories evoked by scent:
1. Choose a scent your really like--cinnamon, vanilla, pepper, your Mom's perfume, wet dog (I dunno!)
2. Close your eyes and imagine the smell and pay attention to the memories it evokes.
3. In one minute, write down five or six memories related to that smell.
4. Choose one memory and write about it in detail for five to ten minutes--what other senses are important for that memory?
5. Make some cinnamon buns and eat them. (Not strictly part of the prompt, but important.)

I'm a writer who also loves to draw. I'm not great a drawing, but I like to practice, and I'm getting better. For the last few days, I've been learning how to use Adobe Illustrator--it's fun! So, I thought I would share with you my first Illustrator drawing effort (it's pretty basic!) along with a little activity.

Have you ever noticed how it's our eyebrows that show how we are feeling? You might think it's whether or not someone is smiling--but really, it's eyebrows! In How to Give Your Cat a Bath, I love it when the little girl gets really mad and ends up with a unibrow. You can see that picture on the page in this website about author visits.

In this picture I've drawn, the faces are all the same and only the eyebrows are different. Can you believe it?  Check out those different emotions!

You can print out a pdf of the faces and draw some eyebrows of your own--what kinds of feelings do your eyebrows show?

Here's a story prompt: choose one of your faces--how is this character feeling? Why are they feeling that way? What happened right before they made that face? What will they do next?

I don't know about you, but I'm finding it hard to write lately. All my days are  . . . the same. It's hard to come up with ideas!

So, here's a little exercise I gave my college scriptwriting students--but it's a nice exercise for anyone who can write to practice writing reactive scenes.

Watch this scene from a family movie I really like, Akeelah and the Bee. It's just one of those nice, feel good, against all odds movies from 2006.

Then pretend you are Akeelah and write what goes through your head following the scene. What is your emotion when it starts, how does it change as you think through what just happened? And finally, you need to make a decision: what will you do now?

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