The Mommy’s Pen Podcast

This week we brainstorm and work through some ideas in Nora's story plotting—playing with the idea of time travel in different eras. There might be a climax that takes place in the kitchen at Hampton Court Palace!Read full show notes at Mommyspen.com.

In this episode, 12-year-old Nora starts brainstorming some details to plan her story and confesses that wearing headbands makes her feel "elevated," a feeling she shares with her protagonist.Read full show notes at Mommyspen.com

This season 12-year-old Nora is going to write a short story using all of the story structure principles we’ve been discussing for the past year on the podcast. We discuss how to start story planning. Follow along and write your own story!

Nora had to pilot the podcast ship this week due to severe little sister interference. She analyzes book 1 in the popular series The School for Good and Evil using the four-act structure.

This week, we're going backwards, looking at the original Mary Poppins movie after our analysis of Mary Poppins Returns last episode. This time, we're looking at it through the 5 Commandments of Story developed by Shawn Coyne of Story Grid.

It’s summer and we’re lazy so we’re doing a movie instead of a book. We liked Mary Poppins Returns way more than we thought we would and we’re analyzing the four act structure.

This week we dissect Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, looking at the five commandments of storytelling for both Eleanor and Marianne’s story arcs.

This week we discuss the BRILLIANT middle grade novel THE BOOK OF BOY by Catherine Gilbert Murdoch. The first part of the episode we tell you why you should read the book, then deconstruct the book’s structure, complete with spoilers.

If you're looking for books that feature diverse characters and tackle inclusion themes (and you should be), this lovely little book deserves a spot in your stack. It's the story of a young Chinese immigrant, Mia Tang, who helps her parents manage a hotel and uses her ever-improving English skills to help just about everyone around her. Full show notes at Mommyspen.com

We start off with a few Alma anecdotes and then launch into this week’s book review: ONE MIXED-UP NIGHT by the brilliant and lovely Catherine Newman who is everything, amen.