December Open Mic

Before you begin, I just want to mention that I will be taking the week off between Christmas and New Years. I’m not planning to move the next Open Mic day, so it will be in six weeks as usual. That’s holidays for you…

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Context

A long time ago, a would-be writer told me in all seriousness that the important things in writing were the action and the dialog. Things like description and setting were just window-dressing, things that were only important to “literary readers.” In the intervening years, visual media have

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Dual climaxes

I recently read a story in which the writer had two villains whose respective plotlines had very different endings. One villain was heading for an action climax with a dramatic set-piece battle scene; the other was heading for an emotional confrontation ending in the revelation of all

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