As a teen, I never cared for love stories. While other girls were sighing and crying over the latest sugary “boy-meets-girl”, I jumped into the classics, swearing romance book writers conspired to create Cinderella pap to weaken women’s minds. (Mom said I was foolish but she kept a soft spot for Barbara Cartland.) Not that I didn’t believe in love! I was just felt very awkward and self-conscious...
It was hard telling the Founding Fathers apart when I was in Elementary School. Every fall another teacher would try to impress the achievements of the frock-coated/ American Revolutionaries into our malleable brains with similar results. In a group portrait of patriots, we could all pick out Franklin (rotund, bald and smiling) and probably Washington by his unsmiling mouth clamped around a set of dentures but the rest were ...
It’s October, one of my favorite months for stories, even though most October stories have a tie to the supernatural. So it only seems right to start off with a story by one of the writers most associated with scary stories: Stephen King. At its essence, marriage is a closed corporation. It’s a private entity with its own personality and the principals own all the stock. Sure, often children are born to a ...
I’ve been thinking about pinch points lately, those intervals in a story when you realize how difficult the hero’s task is. They occur (optimally) at the 3/8th and 5/8th point in a story and structurally, they serve a two-fold purpose: to show how vulnerable the hero(ine) is and what will happen if he/she loses. But structure never interests me as much as character and pinch points teach and clarify these better ...
I like to believe that somewhere out there, someone reads what I write. (To quote one of my favorite plays, In a world where carpenters get resurrections, anything’s possible) If so, they’ve seen alterations in the name of this place, patiently reading while I tried to find the phrase captures the idea and atmosphere I’m trying to create here. The search hasn’t been easy. Initial Title: A good start b...