CONSTANCE HALE is Bay Area based journalist and poet. She is a fiend about the craft of writing and covers it in her books on language: Writing Character (with the Writers Grotto) Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch; Sin and Syntax; and Wired Style. Her other books include The Natives Are Restless, about hula, and ‘Iwalani’s Tree, for children. Connie’s journalism has appeared everywhere from The New York Times to The Atlantic and Honolulu, and her essays have been widely anthologized. She has been an on-staff editor at the San Francisco Examiner, Wired, and Health, and she has edited more than three dozen books, turning narratives about serious subjects into serious page-turners. She also runs writing conferences and retreats at Harvard, Berkeley, and in Hawai‘i, where she is from. Find her writing at www.constancehale.com or come and geek out at sinandsyntax.com.