A few weeks ago, I posted about my pet peeve - overuse of brand names that don’t deepen character or story.
Well, speaking of deepening, I want to deepen this conversation. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about details in fiction.
Poirot, Agatha Christie’s fastidious little detective, likes things just so. So much […]

I was procrastinating writing this week’s blog entry by checking email and I came across one of those annoying forwarded assertions that just sound too…too…too wrong to be right. So, what did I do - sit back and scratch my head and wonder?
No. I just got onto www.snopes.com to check it out. […]

We all know how to structure a story, right? Take a character, plop them down on the bottom of a steep incline and, (aargh!) as they climb, throw obstacle after obstacle at them, one after another, until they (finally - whew!) reach the summit (ta-da!), and fall into a lovely (no loose ends) denouement.
Unless, […]

I’m about to write the check for the rental of a house we’ll be sharing in August at Lake Champlain. August can’t come soon enough, let me tell you.
When I was hashing over what we’ll do during that precious week, aside from going to the Ben and Jerry’s factory and taking a day […]

I’ve been reading a lot of young adult fiction lately. It’s a fabulous pool to dip into. It’s the pool that nearly drowned me twenty-some years ago. I conveniently had a sore throat the morning after every late night spent nearly finishing some wondrous book or another, which allowed me to stay […]

I am hereby announcing a Snow Day. As I don’t feel much like writing a witty post today, I am giving myself a Snow Day. Reasoning? My imagination has white-out. As this is the case, I figure everything I write today will need wite-out. Therefore, the Snow Day.
You too are […]

“Oh, you really lucked out.”
“Huh?”
“You’ve got Valentine’s Day.”
“What? Oh, crap. That’s right. Thursday is Valentine’s Day. Crap.”
Such was the conversation between me and the hubby a couple days ago.
See, people think it’s easier when you’ve got a fixed theme to blog about. Not so, I’ve found. I mean, I […]

Brand names bug me. Nothing screams out of date like a brand name come upon decades later. It’s a cheap ploy to set up a situation as ritzy by naming the cars the valet is parking, the type of champagne drunk and the store at which the protag. bought his wristwatch. It’s […]

This time last year, I’d started a “survey” of all the sub-genres of mystery in order to introduce me to works that I hadn’t read before: to the pleasures of noir, the craft of police procedural, the perils of fem jeop. Of course, like all things I try to put on a schedule, to […]