Saturday, July 29, 2023
TO CATCH A THIEF: ART FRAUD DETECTIVES FIGHTING CRIME by Yvonne Saxon
Saturday, July 22, 2023
LEARNING FROM THE BEST WRITERS by Maria Hudgins
There must be a thousand books on "How to Write." If you read them all you wouldn't have time to write.So what are a few really good ones? How do you know if a book on writing is good? How do you know this author's advice is right or wrong? That's easy. Read a bit of it and if you are having a hard time putting it down--the author knows what he's doing. This topic, after all, is dry as dirt. It's right up there with "How to change the duvet cover," or "How to clean a bathroom," or "Filling out your 1040 form."
The best book on writing I have ever read is Stephen King's "On Writing" which, by now, has probably gone through a dozen editions. I couldn't put it down. I've read it more than once and not because I didn't remember his advice. It's wonderfully entertaining. I can't forget his description of pretending to be a circus strong man when he was two years old.
I've been looking at a website called Master Class and I see a lot of today's top writers are contributing their best suggestions.One click gives you samples of their advice and I have clicked on a bunch of them. I would tend to favor the words of authors that are my personal favorites. If I enjoy them, I think, so would others. My taste in stories is not unusual. I'm pretty typical. It's not free, but at $120/year, it's cheap for what you can get if you really use it.
This may sound stupid, but I learn a lot from listening to a favorite author on audio. It doesn't matter if the author is doing the reading or not. Some writers are not good readers, and some are. Listening frees your mind to think only about the story. When you aren't thinking about the words on the page or how many pages are left in this chapter, you become more aware of the structure. Why is the writer giving you all these details in one chapter but not in another one? Where is the viewpoint character and what are his eyes seeing? If she parks her car, does she immediately open the door? Does she remember to pick up her purse? Why does the writer skip over all the details sometimes with a brief, "Next morning, he flew to Chicago?" Details are tedious if they don't move the story forward.
Sometimes I can just lie in bed with my eyes closed and realize that I'm working!
Saturday, July 15, 2023
WHAT WE'RE READING THIS SUMMER! by the Sand In Our Shorts Gang
Michael Rigg:
I’m not much of a beach reader. Sun and sand and sweat don’t create an inviting atmosphere for reading. (And sunscreen makes the pages stick together.) But sitting at a beach house in Sandbridge pouring over a novel, with the roar of the ocean as background? Well, that’s a horse of a different color. Especially if there’s air conditioning involved. Next on my summer
Saturday, July 8, 2023
VACATION FUN: BEAUTY, HISTORY, AND MYSTERY! By Angela G. Slevin
The throne room |
The island of Crete, Greece, sits in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and is huge in comparison to the other Greek isles. Crete measures 160 miles wide from west to east, and varies in width from 7.5 to 37 miles from north to south, making its area 3,218 square miles. Crete was an independent nation from 1898 until 1913, when it joined modern Greece.
Saturday, July 1, 2023
RESEARCH: A CRITICAL PART OF WRITING. BUT NO ONE SAYS IT HAS TO BE BORING! By Michael Rigg
Harriet Robin New Orleans School of Cooking |
In sum, fiction—the ultimate untruth—must,
of necessity, be based in truth, and supported by facts. Our written untruth must be believable. Thorough
research is how we attain this believable untruth. Research is the lifeblood of
good fiction. If it doesn’t ring true, the reader will soon be bored and more
likely to put our novel down and, worse, add us to their “do not read” list.
Saturday, June 24, 2023
STRENGTHEN YOUR SUBMISSIONS STRATEGY, Part 5 by Max Jason Peterson (aka Adele Gardner)
Happy Father's Day, Delbo G.!
Delbert R. Gardner and Adele Gardner |
Growing up, I had the time of my life sharing the writing path with my father, Delbert R. Gardner, a talented writer of poetry, fiction, humor, and essays, who during my lifetime worked variously as a professor of English literature who taught creative writing, and as a writer/editor for TRADOC who felt a special mission to improve training materials for the Army thanks to his experiences in World War II. I’m writing this on the eve of Father’s Day, so I just wanted to share how much it always went to me that Dad was my writing mentor, always encouraging me, providing feedback when I wanted it that was always on a level I could benefit from while growing up, just sharing the joy of the writing life together, and also showing me all the ropes with submissions. I started submitting my stories at fourteen and had my first poems published at sixteen thanks to Dad’s guidance. We were also writing pals—sharing writing sessions; offering one another encouragement; sending out manuscripts through the post every month; celebrating one another’s acceptances and tips about editors who might like each other’s work. (And now I’m his literary executor; and it’s in that capacity that I first began using statistics to track our submissions.) Since he helped me so much, and since I got such a lucky break having such a father (in terms of being a writer, naturally; but also, he was just simply an extraordinary Dad, so loving and wise, playing with us, sharing jokes, helping us with our homework and with life—our best friend) I feel strongly about passing on some of the things I learned thanks to Dad—things he taught me, and things I went on to find out as a direct result of his influence.
Saturday, June 17, 2023
LOOK! IT'S A BOOK! MY LIFELONG ITCH TO PUT A COVER AROUND MY WRITING By Judy Fowler
In her book The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron wrote that every artist has their own idea of True North. That's their "I have arrived" moment. Seeing my writing between two covers with a spine has been my True North since third grade.
That's the year my teacher tasked us with writing a report on a country. Ugh. Tedious. Then she said our reports had to be bound in a hardcover binder. The uphill assignment suddenly took on the wonder of a trip to Disneyland.
I could hardly wait to get home, choose a country, pull out my brother's World Book Encyclopedia and get down to some shameless cribbing.
Okay, I cared a little about
the content of my report. First, I wanted a country no other eight-year-old Glen Cove student would pick to write about. Second, the nation had to be
manageable in scope. Switzerland and Germany were out.
My choice was Ruanda-Burundi, a photo
of which I'd seen in a National Geographic.
In nineteen-fifty-eight, kids used
two-hole ruled paper and printed neatly on sheets of it in pencil. My
teacher asked for the reports to be sectioned into Customs, Culture, Social
Groups, Arts, Clothing, and History. Luckily, Volume R of the World Book
had those bases covered.
But I was working toward that
cover. For the blissful moment when I'd place my penciled pages of paragraphs into the black hardcover binder my mother let me purchase from the
school supply section of Newberry’s (yesterday's Dollar Tree).
I glued a large red and
white paper label (used by Mom to mail packages) on the front cover and boldly
wrote on it with red pen:
RUANDA-BURUNDI
by Judy Fowler
I sat cross-legged on the floor and held that covered beauty in my hands. I peeked inside to look at those penciled
pages snuggled up inside it. True North.
Holiday card-making exposed the same compulsive urge to cover the "Roses are Red" dreck I'd written for my parents and grandparents. It wasn’t a card until I'd nestled it inside a
homemade envelope, even if the card never saw a mailbox and only had to go
upstairs on a tray.
A few months ago, a story of mine
became downloadable in an anthology titled Rock, Roll, and Ruin,
edited by Karen Pullen of North Carolina’s Triangle Chapter of Sisters in
Crime. The stories are fantastic, but what I wanted to see most? The e-book cover.
Most manuscripts I read to my colleagues
leave me less than thrilled until I get them covered. I love the magic of Fiver. They take
my ideas and in two days a cover appears. I can even tweak it and
get it back again in a few hours. It's an itch my discretionary income allows.
So, whether my story appears alone or last or
eighth in a manuscript's batting order, I’m just happy to know it's inside something. I judge a book once it's covered.
SANTA'S JOURNEY THROUGH TIME by Teresa Inge
Any kid can tell you where Santa Claus is from—the North Pole. But his historical journey is even longer and more fantastic than his annual,...
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What is influencing and who are influencers? Influencing can be applied to any individual who can influence behavior in their followers thro...
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It’s that time of year, you know, beach season. A time to pack up your beach bag and escape to the shore for bit of fun and sun (and in my c...
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Did you grow up listening to the lyrics from Broadway musicals? "I'd do anything for you, dear, anything." In this still p...