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Regrets?
Regrets? I’ve had a few… I mean, who hasn’t? The job opportunity you didn’t pursue, the romantic encounter you let go (or didn’t), even the insult you let slide, these can all be Morley’s ghost, clanging chains of what “might have been” on sleepless nights or depressing days. I will say this: regrets are, for…
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Hyper-Productivity and Self-Deception
I just went through the most productive 5 days of my entire writing career. Starting very early Thursday morning and ending Tuesday afternoon, I completed some 10 chapters, consisting of about 43 double-spaced pages, and finished the third book of the current trilogy. This was part of a surge going back several weeks, and it…
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Wasting Time
“What a waste of time!” Probably the ultimate insult or rebuke, an inference that some small portion of your existence has been stolen by an experience or activity so useless, so pathetic as to leave you with nothing of value whatsoever. Well, I’ll never get those two hours back. It’s the movie “Forecast: Cloudy with…
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How NOT to Twist a Plot
Ah, the plot twist! That unexpected swing of the story nobody saw coming that widens the eyes, quickens the heart, and sets the mind to racing. It can be the rousing climax of the book…or a puzzling let down with a “Huh?” or worse “What the…?” I just finished White Smoke by Andrew Greeley, and…
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Style over Substance – The Cost of Typos
A few months ago, I wrote a blog post on critics where my work was the focus of review. This one turns the tables, and I’m the one critiquing a new author. I’ve been trying to familiarize myself with the urban fantasy genre (since that’s what I’m supposed to be writing), so I’ve been reading…
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Review: Origin by Dan Brown
I’ve started writing book reviews. Entirely for myself. Only short, 1-2 pages summaries of the book I’ve just read, trying to capture the essence of the work, recording its strengths and weaknesses, and how they may relate to my own writings. This is termed “analytical reading”, an awareness of what the author is doing even…