Val Muller

The Electronic Wordsmith

Browsing Posts in musings

I remember as a kid being bored once in a while. But mostly, I entertained myself. I remember waking up on weekend mornings. I knew it was too early to wake up because I didn’t hear my mom yet. So I would stay in bed and look at my walls and door. The walls were […]

For this week’s Writer Wednesday feature, I’m honored to feature guest author Harriet Michael. A Christian writer, she has written a devotional and a book about prayer. I enjoy how her post today asks us to focus on the value of little things. Our lives are often so rushed that we don’t take time to […]

Today’s post is part of a series in which I highlight a character or theme from one of my works, especially as it relates to something in the news. Today’s post is a reaction to a news story I read about in July, and although I wrote this over the summer, I thought I’d save […]

This week, I had the opportunity to talk with Alana Woods, author of two contemporary Australian thrillers.  Tell us about yourself: Career public servant in a past life.  And a professional editor for much of it.  After giving up full-time employment some years ago I took on contract editing, and that ended up being full-time […]

For today’s Fantastic Friday post, I wanted to share some Memorial Day thoughts: Each year growing up, I biked several miles with my parents to watch the huge Memorial Day parade. It was a big deal, and of course to a kid, it was a day to have fun. It started with Dad putting the […]

There are some people in life who always seem to look on the bright side of any situation. My father-in-law, Allen, was one of them. No matter what was happening, he was always the one making a joke or finding the humor in a situation. He rarely (ever?) let things get him angry. Here is […]

The thing I despise most is having control of my life placed into someone else’s hands. It is a certainty in life that not everything is able to be controlled. Nonetheless, there are things we can do to lower risks to ourselves. I found myself in a situation Tuesday morning in which the careless decisions […]

As I’ve done in Novembers of the past, I wanted to highlight thirty reasons I am thankful. It’s so easy to go through each day dwelling on the negative; in fact, it seems negativity spreads much more quickly than positivity. But if we each take just a moment to thank someone, or to make their […]

…or “Why I Wrote The Scarred Letter” Background A high school English teacher, I taught The Scarlet Letter year after year. For some students (too few), it became a favorite book that they remembered even years after graduating. For others, Hawthorne’s sentence length, ornate language, and complicated concepts made the reading too difficult to complete […]

Happy October! For those of you loving sweaters and pumpkin spice everything, happy October! For those of you dreading the snow and plummeting temperatures—enjoy October while you can. And for those of you (like me) who miss summer already, just be glad it’s not winter quite yet—and “we are closer to spring than we were […]