John Adams (allegedly) said it first: “If a person is not a liberal when he is twenty, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative when he is forty, he has no head.” I know better than to disagree with the dead—there’s no way to win the argument—but John missed the boat with that one, at least as far as I’m concerned.
Read MoreIt’s time that I look back on the previous quarter and review my successes and failures—what actions should I repeat, and which should I avoid. This is a good thing for anyone to do and I probably should apply such a thing to my personal life.
Read MoreWhen I was in junior high school (the early ’80s), an English teacher handed out a page of funny writing rules. It didn’t attribute any authorship, so I always thought it was hers. I loved these guidelines so much that I kept them for many years until the paper became severely worn.
Read MoreAre you writing a crucial fight scene for your novel that feels uninspiring?
Or perhaps you’ve never been in a donnybrook before, and you’re worried that the mechanics of a pivotal conflict won’t sound ‘right’ in your narrative.
Read MoreThere’s a saying that the days are long, but the years are short. Well, that means the months are pretty darn quick themselves. It’s amazing how fast three of them just went by. I feel that a couple of things cause this.
Read MoreIn An Unfinished Story, I shared a letter from my dad written twenty years ago. He mentioned that it was “nice to see something without a lot of swear words and cussing.”
Read MoreI’ve been wondering how you keep your series separate in your head. Do you find yourself writing and then saying, “Oops, wrong character/genre/storyline!” - Coleen
Thank you for the question, Coleen. It’s a great one!
Read MoreI thought I would try something different this week—a quarterly update for all things related to the writing life. I’ve never done this before, and I hope it provides more insight into how things are progressing. I’m not going to delay further with chit-chat. Let’s get started.
Read MoreMy writing career began in 1996. Sometime during that year, I sat at my computer and wrote a single-page story. It featured a cop drinking in a bar. Anger and bluster filled every word. It was an unreadable tale written by an unhappy man.
Read MoreI love music. Hang around me for any length of time, and you’ll probably discover that my favorite genre is hard rock. It seeps into the way I talk, the way I dress, and the way I connect with others. While some in my age bracket (a slacker wave to those in Generation X) might be embarrassed to say they’re still metalheads, I’m not.
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