Bruce Atchison's Page

Children today have access to a wide variety of toys for outdoor winter fun. Forty years ago, my blind schoolmates and I only had a wooden toboggan. Even then, we couldn't use the one in the storage room unless a supervisor watched over us. From my Deliverance from Jericho memoir… Continue

We all understand that writing is a craft but it need not be a mysterious or tedious one. Sigrid Macdonald, a Canadian author and editor, has just written a guide to editing that is both informative and conversational. Even irksome subjects such as punctuation and sentence structure are handled in a lig… Continue

School administrators have banned an astonishing assortment of innocent objects and substances in recent years. Everything from a chicken finger, that a boy aimed like a gun at another student, to a pair of scissors caused politically-correct officials to punish pupils and, in some cases, send them to psychologi… Continue

Remember Y2K? From the vantage point of 2010, the fear of societal breakdown seems laughable. In fact, certain newsgroup users called it Lie2K because practically nothing went wrong. Before 2000, the threat seemed real and many people, even those not prone to believing doomsday survivalists, took the possibility of… Continue

A fellow writer just gave me a brilliant idea for promoting not only my books but how I write them. This friend, who is totally blind, gives talks at schools about JAWS, a screen reading program that converts the text on the monitor and keystrokes into synthetic speech. With this innovation, visually-impaired people can use computers almost as easily as their sighted peers. As I have similar software to that of my friend, I could demonstrate it to the kids in the schools near my home. Additional… Continue