Like love and other things, writing lessons are where you find them. For example, want to read some good dialogue, and learn from it? Look no further than my favorite coffee mug.

The mug, which was my favorite Christmas present last year, features text from UrbanDictionary.com.  To illustrate the phrase “moo point,” there’s this dialogue from an episode of Friends:

Joey: All right, Rach. The big question is, “does he like you?” All right? Because if he doesn’t like you, this is all a moo point.

Rachel: Huh. A moo point?

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In this book, Samuel M. Kamakau examines aspects of the material culture of his ancestors. The text is a translated and edited version of a series of articles published in the Hawaiian language newspaper Ke Au ‘Oko‘a in 1969 and 1870. Kamakau wrote of practices that were fast disappearing with i [...]
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Based on historical events, Anshu is a tale of passion and human triumph in the face of extraordinary adversity, spanning the cane fields of Hawai‘i and the devastation i [...]
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Under Maui Skies, a book of short stories by Wayne Moniz, won the hearts, minds and votes of more than 1500 HawaiiReaders.com readers as the readers' choice book of 2009. The award was given as part of the Ka Palapala Po'okela awards at a gala event on April 30. Ben: A Memoir, from Street Kid to Go [...]
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"One of the most engaging works of fiction to come out of Hawai‘i in a long while." - San Francisco Chronicle In Under Maui Skies and Other Stories, Wayne Moniz offers seven tales of his island home, each [...]
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One of Watermark Publishing’s authors, Frances H. Kakugawa, started a dialogue with Charles Pellegrino, author of The Last Train from Hiroshima, a book which earlier this year received a great deal of attention for not-so-good reasons. Think James Frey-Oprah Winfrey-A Million Little Pieces-attention.

Frances, a former Hawaii public school educator, felt a very personal connection with Pellegrino’s Last Train, which chronicles the experiences of some of the survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bomb—her parents’ families perished at Hiroshima. When she discovered that there was some controversy over whether the survivors’ accounts were true or not (one of Pellegrino’s sources turned out to have duped the author), she posted an open letter to the author on her blog expressing her dismay.

To her surprise, Pellegrino wrote back to her.

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You'll have your own list of things you did during the tsunami warning in Hawaii last Saturday, but here's my list of things I did not do. See if [...]
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Here’s the third question that helps us understand how readers and writers connect.  Earlier we looked at the connecting power of humor and laughter, as well as a common concern by readers and writers for characters in pain.

Now we come to poison and dying, and at a time like this I wish I were a mystery writer.  Agatha Christie loved to kick off her mysteries with a good old-fashioned poisoning.  Her 80 mystery novels have sold about four billion copies in 45 languages. They say that everybody loves a good mystery, and apparently everybody also loves a good poisoning.

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The classic tale of the prophetess of Moloka‘i is back in print for a limited edition. The “bowl of light” parable is featured: “Every child born has at birth, a Bowl of perfect Light. If he tends his Light, it will grow in strength and he can do all things … If, however, he becomes envious or jealous he drops a stone into his bowl of Light, and a little of the Light will go out.… If at any time he tires of being a stone, all he needs to do is huli [turn] the bowl and the stones will all fall away, and the Light will come back and grow once more.” Also covers

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