Happy holidays to everybody. Christmas and Hanuka’s first night both fall on a Wednesday this year, so I felt a more specific wish was appropriate. In the same spirit, I offer a link to one of my favorite poems of all time, John M. Ford’s Winter Solstice,
Read more →Even in a novel that has a prologue, the writer will, at some point, need to get more context into the story somehow. (Most novels don’t need a prologue–see last week’s post–and those that do, don’t need the twenty-plus pages that would give the reader everything they might
Read more →Context is important. It’s not the only thing that is important in a story, though, and sometimes it isn’t as important as writers think it is. Getting the context into the story is a perennial writing difficulty. There are two main solutions: working the context into the
Read more →The holiday season is now officially in full swing. Around here, it starts slowly, a bit before Halloween, then ramps up gradually until just before Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving week is a steep climb full of preparations for either going somewhere to celebrate or hosting a celebration, and after
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