The cake! Me (in the stripes in front) and the book club!
Read more →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
Read more →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.)
Read more →I had brunch this morning with my friend Rosemary, who is about as crazy as I am but on just a different enough axis that we stimulate each other to new heights of silliness, rather than bogging down because we’ve each had exactly the same idea and
Read more →The second most common way of leading into and out of a flashback sequence is by shifting tenses. Most novels are told in what’s called the “historic present,” meaning that the “now” of the story is told in simple past tense (He slept in the library all afternoon rather than
Read more →There are two important things to know about flashbacks: how to do them, and when to do them. Both things can be trickier to figure out than they look. First, a definition: as far as I’m concerned, flashbacks are a way of conveying some background/backstory information as if it
Read more →Over the years, I have worked with a lot of editors myself, and watched a lot of my friends work with others. Some have been better than others; some have just been a better fit than others. But they all do pretty much the same thankless, undervalued,
Read more →Every so often, I get asked what the difference is between writing fantasy and writing realistic fiction. It’s a pretty good question, though since I’ve never written anything that wasn’t science fiction or fantasy, I’m not sure why anyone expects me to know. (Of course, I have
Read more →Some people are afraid to exercise their talents, or afraid that if they try, they will fail and have to face just how little talent they have. But far more are just simply not interested enough. Writing a book sounds like a nice thing to do —
Read more →So you have a bunch of characters, and you want your readers to get to know them. How do you do that? Well, how do you get to know people in real life? You find out about them based on what other people say about them (“”He’s
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