Shannon Costello

When should “Petty Gluttony” be re-named “The Well-Rounded Me”?

By the numbers: 2 nights camping, 2 nights in hotels, 60+ confirmed mosquito bites on my legs (oops on forgetting the repellent on Sunday’s hike)
Best moments:  long hours outside, watching all those brilliant stars Friday night, hiking in the rain, tree & bird identification, piles of alligators basking in the sunshine, dolphins in a feeding [...]

I have finished my first attempt at a novel and am thinking about my second.  That made it more interesting to read a second novel by a real writer. 
I think what I loved best about this book was the way the author used her writing (including some gorgeous poetic phrases) to write things [...]

This Young Adult book is one of the few high school YA books I have read.  I enjoyed the book, but I’m glad to spend most of my time with the less edgy middle school stuff.
I thought the book was quite good.  The story drew me in and the plot was well-constructed, meaning that I [...]

My roommate on the Bolivia trip was Canadian, so it was somewhere in the depths of South America that it occurred to me that I knew NOTHING about Canada.  Wasn’t it just a kind of United States North?
So that’s why I started this book.  And running out of renewals helped inspire me to finish it [...]

My grief over not having children is, to me, comparable to the grief of losing someone I care about to death.  In this case, I just don’t know who I lost.
Pastors love the story behind “It is Well with my Soul”.  Of course I’ve heard it a bunch of times, but it still made me [...]

I’m afraid this blog is deteriorating into a journal, meaning that I’m using it as a way to think through things as opposed to writing about things I have already thought through.
This abstract/concrete stuff may be a way of talking about how people look at things, and you have to look at them a certain [...]

A rainbow is formed by the separation of light waves passing through water. Very concrete and predictable in that sense.  But it is also a symbol of hope.  And it’s beautiful.  I was going to write a dialogue contrasting the abstract and the concrete, and I was going to start with rainbows.  Life seems like [...]