Brandiwyn🎶 v.2026, also known as Michelle Tuesday, is a musician, educator and writer hailing from Columbus, Ohio.
La Bene Vita
The (Tentative*) Topic Rotation Self Sundays: Personal blogging days about family, leisure, work, and health. May be boring.
Music Mondays: Commentary, articles, and links highlighting music, theory, and ed topics.
Writing Wednesdays: Discussion on the art and business of writing. "Invalid Item" Thursdays: A weekly original short story submission.
Friday Reviews**: Every Friday, I will review a minimum of one short story on WDC.
* I reserve the right to change the topic of the day at any time, at least until I acquire a million followers and gain official "influencer" status, at which point I shall be more consistent in order to meet the expectations of my adoring public.
** I can only commit to one review per week. If you would like your short story to be in my reviewing queue, please send me a WDC review request. Checkout my public reviews toget a sense of what to expect.
I love a good turn of phrase, and even novels have poetic pieces within them. I'm excited to hear you're getting into poetry and hope we can explore that more.
Anni Pon- having to plan or edit poetry seems a little antithetical to it's nature.
This is an excellent point, and something I didn't think of. I also agree with your other comments.
I agree with what you've said about poetry. It's very easy to write a poem, just about anyone can do it. But it's hard to do it well. Most people have an innate sense of story telling, so amateur prose usually isn't as cringe. A lot of people seem to think that if you just add line breaks to your current stream of consciousness, or put together a series of lines that rhyme, that's a poem. But poetry has rules -- it requires meter and imagery and abstraction. It should have layers. Those things don't usually come naturally; they require intentional effort and planning. However, most people have the impression you can just sit down and poetry will flow out of you without even trying or having to edit after. In fact, having to plan or edit poetry seems a little antithetical to it's nature.
To be fair, mediocre poetry still serves a purpose. It's writing practice, catharsis, bonding, etc. I've definitely seen some on here that have a lot of potential, as well as some really good "amateur" poetry.
Charlèaux - I agree and love WDC too! I've personally posted a lot of less-than-brilliant works of all varieties and learned from feedback. I actually feel like reviewing the work of others teaches me just as much, if not more. Nineteen years is a lot of learning! I should have a PhD by now. I certainly don't mean to discourage anyone, beginner or otherwise. It's just how I learned to recognize good poetry and what makes it good, that ability to compare/contrast. I appreciate the variety that allowed me to learn. So I'm not saying don't post your beginner poetry.
Robert Waltz- To your point that sometimes authors just need the catharsis of writing the words, I'm with you - if I feel like it's more intended as a personal journaling experience, I don't review it. On a related note, I never really circled back about reviewing poetry as a "quick read" to meet reviewing goals. Over the years, as I've become better at noticing the layers in brilliant poetry, it can actually take much longer to read, digest, analyze, and properly review. And good point about imagery being a key element of poetry.
One thing I look for in poetry is concrete imagery. If you're just writing about your feelings, even if it rhymes and has meter, it's not what I'd call good poetry. And yes, I'm including my own efforts in that.
But.
Writing it can be a kind of release for the writer, and I can understand that. Reviewing such poetry is difficult, at least for me, especially when I can tell it's heartfelt and very personal. To be perfectly honest, most of the time, I skip such efforts when I'm on a reviewing kick.
I call such work "angsta rap," because it's all angst, and lots of words that don't really communicate anything new.
One of the most important writing lessons I've learned here is that, paradoxically, the more specific you are in your writing, the more relatable it can be. Writing something like "My parents never understood me" is boring; instead, if you wrote something like "They gave me a Playstation when I wanted an Xbox" is closer to the right track, in my opinion. This is especially important in comedy, I think, but it's also applicable to other genres.
A lot of poems on WdC leave something to be desired. So does a lot of the fiction, or really any form of writing on here.
I think the reason for that is because this is not a publishing company. This is a website for writers to share their work—first drafts, unpolished... And I think that's one of the best things of WdC.
Like you said, that's not to say that these pieces are all inherently bad. It just means that this community has become a safe space for people to not only share their finished, edited, and perfect work, but it's also a space to share those midnight thoughts, random poems that hold no meaning, or maybe a piece that they know they'll never go back to edit but they share it anyway.
Because that's what WdC is: Unedited, clumsy, non-published writing from mostly amateurs. That's why I love WdC. Sure, I get to read a lot of crappy pieces. But if those people stick around, I also get to watch them get better and improve their work.
This is also a great site because it's one of the few places where you get to come across published authors as well as the 14 year old who just wrote their very first poem and had the guts the post it.
This isn't me disagreeing with you. Really it's me agreeing with you. But that's why I love WdC. Some pieces melt my brain with emotions, and others make me cringe while trying to read through grammatical errors. It's like Russian roulette but with words.
if you're curious, she made it in time for my lesson.
I'm learning a lot and apparently she's allowing my muse to lead us.
I swear this isn't some kind of rookie mistake...
I updated the contents of the Biography tab of my Portfolio and the introduction to this blog today.
Work:
At the music school, we wrapped up 2025 versions of all our logs, schedules, checklists, etc. and prepped 2026 versions. We closed the books for December and for 2025.
2025 was a terrible year for the school's profits.
Reasons:
- Our 7-year-old A/C died, and HVAC systems have doubled in price since we installed the last one in 2018.
- Our money guru had a stroke and some mini-strokes last year. She was out a lot, but also, she made some key mistakes and/or failed to catch some of my mistakes that she ordinarily would have caught through routine processes and procedures. It was unlike her, and since neither she nor I knew what was happening to her brain before the big stroke, neither of us thought to question anything. I accidentally left some social media ads for time-bound events way beyond the event dates, and she saw the charges but didn't ask me if I was overspending on purpose. I overspent my January ads budget by triple the budget amount! Then it happened again in the spring.
- I paid a good-for-nothing digital marketing company (handling Google Ads) way too much for way too long, and I'm pissed at myself over it. I would have never hired them in the first place - the rep gave me a used-car-salesman vibe, and I have a very low tolerance for that vibe. But this company bought out my former company (I LOVED them), so I didn't see it as hiring a new company. But it really was. And they sucked. And since I've had a bad PD (Parkinson's Disease) year, I was so tired most of the year that I struggled to keep up. The point of a third party marketing company is to take the monitoring requirement off my plate. I finally fired them in November.
- A scammer posing as an employee sent an email requesting a change to her direct deposit bank account. I fired it off to the money guru without looking closely, so I didn't notice that it wasn't the employee's typical email address, nor the minor errors in the email that she would never make. The money guru didn't notice, either, and proceeded to collect the new bank account information, over email, and process the account change without a physical signature or verbal discussion. She later said she wondered about some of the employee's weird questions (like when she gets paid - an employee since 2010). Soooo... the scammer walked away with the paycheck, and we had to pay the employee's paycheck again.
- I was unhappy with the way our former payroll processing company handled the scam situation, so I switched to a local HR company. They're actually cheaper, monthly, and they do more - they withhold, file and submit all the local municipality taxes*. However, we had a one-time onboarding cost with the new company, and we had to adjust our tax payment timing permanently to an earlier date (a cash flow thing that required an influx of cash that we won't see back until the day we close our doors forever.)
*Other states collect state taxes and distribute to the municipalities, but in Ohio, towns collects their own revenue directly, so Ohioans file federal, state, and local returns. Accountants hate Ohio! In a small business, we have to send filings and withholding to Every. Single. Town. where any of our employees live, plus the town where the business is located. Twice (in 16 years) we've made filing errors or missed a deadline where the fine was higher than the withholding - example, we paid a fine of $150 for a late $11 withholding payment for an employee living in the tiny town of Johnstown, Ohio.
Health: For the last year or more, I've struggled with energy due to Parkinson's symptoms and three conflicting drugs: two stimulants (for ADHD and Parkinson's) and a sleep aid. It's a constant balancing act trying to get enough sleep despite the stimulants, without overdoing it on the sleep aid and feeling sleepy all day. I'd talk more about that today, but I'm too tired. So I'll save that for another Sunday. Suffice to say, my energy level is not helping me keep up.
I've talked about myself enough for one day.
On a related note, "Self Sundays" sounds so stupid. I'm taking renaming suggestions based on the description in my blog intro and/or the dribble I fed you today.
Whatever. I met my goal and then some. But Music Monday tomorrow will probably be more interesting.
it's now on the list!
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, also known as Michelle Tuesday, is a musician, educator and writer hailing from Columbus, Ohio.
Thursdays: A weekly original short story submission.