Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

According to the Farmer's Almanac, the dog days of summer follow the summer solstice and last for 40 days.

The lake wasn't far, but walking in the shimmering heat made it seem farther away than usual. As she got closer, the rotten stink of dead fish assaulted her nose. Sometimes when it got this hot the lake would shrink and fish would get caught in the muck and die. She figured this summer was hot enough to kill some fish, but when she got to the lake it didn't seem any smaller. Then she saw the dead fish washed up on the shore. There were a lot of them. "Ew!" She said to nobody.

Prodding one of the dead fish with the toe of her tennis shoe, she watched a little crab scuttle out from underneath it's body and disappear into the murky water. She wondered if the crab had been eating the dead fish or had just been hiding in the shade. Probably, if it had been eating the dead fish there would've been a lot more crabs than just one, like ants on a watermelon rind at Aunt Clara's picnic last year. She shuddered thinking about as many crabs as there had been ants.

"It's the algae in the water."

She spun around and saw an old woman with shaggy, grey hair and a walking stick standing behind her. "What?"

"There's too much algae in the water. It kills the fish." The woman said, nodding down at the dead fish at her sandal-clad feet.

"What's al-gee?"

The woman cocked her head. "It's a kind of water plant."

The girl shook her head. "Plants don't kill fish, animals do. Like...like," she struggled to remember an animal that ate fish, "bears."

"Not many bears around here."

The girl glanced up and down the beach. It was true. She'd never seen a bear eating fish at the lake. Or had ever actually seen a bear. Only pictures in books. Marcus's books mostly. Boy books had way more pictures of animals like bears and sharks than girl books did.

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.