Journal blank books, writing prompts, etc. are not in our usual repertoire but sometimes fate hands you a good thing you don’t expect. Sheila Allee’s “All are Free to Write” is one of those. It is a vast improvement over the typical products in the “low-content” genre, and might even be considered a collection of very short stories. Its 52 stories are set up as a prompt for writing something once a week for a year, but unlike most such products, the prompts are not one-line quotes from famous people or motivational meme sentences. Instead, each section is carefully crafted to provide a vignette from the author’s experience and by the end of the year you will  know her as well as you anyone but your real lifelong friends (and probably better than many of those, because we don’t share all our secrets, do we?) The book is still useful even if you are not into journaling, because you can certainly use the thought for the week to prompt you on something you are involved with. For instance, the first piece of giving yourself permission to do something other than the daily routine spurred a business blog post on the need for companies to make investments in “sharpening the saw” if they wanted to stay competitive in a fast-moving world.