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Do you enjoy the posts on Write Well? The tips, essays, and, perhaps most importantly, the interviews on Ask the Writer? Did you happen to catch the interviews with Dennis Lehane, Kevin Brockmeier, and Benjamin Percy, among others?

Did it make you want to read their books?

And if you could give back -- at no cost or hassle to yourself -- would you?

I'm pleased to announce the Read Well Amazon-affiliate bookstore. It's just like Amazon, except a small percentage of the money you spend goes back to support the efforts of Write Well.

The prices are the same. It has the same hassle-free navigation as Amazon, the "We also recommend..." links, the customer and starred reviews, the ultra-secure shopping cart, check-out, and shipping. You can see the search box on the right -- an exact duplicate, isn't it?

You even use the same user name and password that you use on Amazon.

As a bonus, though, we've tailored the Read Well store to our site. For example, the opening page is populated by authors who answered questions on Ask the Writer. You can buy Dennis Lehane's Gone, Baby, Gone, Ben Percy's Refresh, Refresh, and Kevin Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead, along with all the other books and movies featured on those pages (be sure to click over at the bottom of the page, so you can see all of the section).

The second link, A Writer's Toolbox (again, pictured on the right) features all the best books on fiction technique, especially the ones referenced in posts on this site -- John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist, Francine Prose's Reading Like A Writer, and Betsy Lerner's The Forest for the Trees. It also includes, on the second page, a link to the textbook Missouri State's Creative Writing faculty uses when we teach English 215: Introduction to Short Story Writing (this, of course, would be Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, 7th Ed. by Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French).

Last night, I announced that I planned to play a game at the end of class. Around 8:30 pm, after we had written several exercises from John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, I explained the rules: The class is divided up into two teams, Right Team and Left Team. I flipped a coin to see which team would send up a player first. Let's say Jack was chosen. Jack and I go out into the hall for a minute, where Jack chooses some popular or historical figure: Mark Twain or Gary Kasparov. Mark Twain can be our example. So Jack settles on Mark Twain, then he and I go back in. "I am a dead American," he tells the class.

The game, which John Gardner claims was played by students in the 1950s at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, is called Smoke.

Each team takes turns asking questions that strain metaphorical intelligence: For example, "What kind of smoke are you?" If Jack answers, "Cigar smoke," that's cheating. Jack can't answer what kind of smoke that person would enjoy, if any, but Jack must answer what kind of smoke that person would actually be. Other questions might be "What kind of hairstyle are you?" and "What kind of footwear would you be?" And so on.

In the example of Mark Twain, a proper answer might be, "I'm smoke from a campfire you cook on in the country, sweet with the smell of wood chips and the spice of cooking meat, but if you breathe too deeply of me I'm caustic." Last night, one student who was particularly good at the game said Hunter S. Thompson would be a prematurely balding hairstyle. Hilarious and so true, don't you think?

Whichever team shouts "Mark Twain!" or whatever first gets to send up the next player. That team also gets a point.

The game tests intelligences that are hard to stretch. The students grasped quickly the rules of the game, and although some of them hinted too strongly at their person's identity, a few had quite a long, good run. As Gardner suggests, the more pointed and accurate the metaphors, the more likely people will feel right about the answer. If someone suggests Roger Clemens is a jungle cat (like a tiger), people will say, "You misled us when you said he was a tiger," because let's face it, Clemens is more of a coyote (predatory, powerful, and violent, king of his domain, but not above scavenging, or being a trickster, even a liar). It's amazing how accurate some of the questions can be, even though they translate, let's say, Vladimir Lenin into a hairstyle or a type of footwear.