December 29, 2009 – 11:25 am
I flew down to Alabama for the Big Family Christmas this year. That meant I also flew back the day after Christmas.
Which was also the day after some idiot tried to blow up a plane over Detroit.
My sister and I were lucky - the new “security precautions” didn’t get put into place until after we [...]
December 20, 2009 – 11:46 pm
As promised, here are the first couple of closet pictures. As some of you already know, I have the coolest closets in the world. My sister Carol, who used to paint theater scenery for a living, decided to “redecorate” the interiors of of my ordinary boring closets with decor from my favorite children’s books. This [...]
December 15, 2009 – 11:13 am
When a writer sets out to tell a story, she has a lot of choices to make, and every time she makes one, it influences what options are still available for the other choices. In some cases, one decision can completely eliminate all other options.
Take the matter of narrative voice (which I define as the [...]
December 11, 2009 – 12:17 pm
I keep running across people who think that there is One Right Way to write a story, and who tie themselves in knots trying to force themselves to write “the right way” when it doesn’t suit their particurlar mental processes. Somewhere, somehow, they’ve gotten convinced (usually because some authority figure like an editor or highly respected [...]
December 8, 2009 – 11:02 am
The cake!
Me (in the stripes in front) and the book club!
December 7, 2009 – 5:50 pm
I am grumpy.
It’s partly my own fault, and partly not (at least, I think it isn’t). The part that I think is not my fault has to do with the refusal of my blogging software to upload pictures, despite several hours of trying different formats with the supposedly-easy-built-in-uploader. The software finds the right file, crunches [...]
December 3, 2009 – 12:07 pm
A speech tag is the thing that goes with a line of dialog that tells you who said it; it “tags” the line with the name (or occupation, or some other identifiable description) of the person who said it.
“Run!” Jeff cried. (”Jeff cried” is the speech tag.)
Jane said, “I can’t.” (”Jane said” is the speech [...]