While I have fully flipped over into Christmas mode, I have one last post-Thanksgiving thing to share with any of you who celebrated that nearly two weeks ago (!) and maybe — like me — still are dealing with bits and pieces of leftovers. In my case, I wound up with a lot of corn bread…
Category: General
Legacy category, auto fed to Life-Notes& News page. Best used for anything NOT specific to Fiction Extras, From the Kitchen – our writing groups, book recs, author adjacent things.
Big Bad Times Three
The Big Bad started as a TV trope1 – an evil force that works to corrupt, defeat, eliminate the protagonist of the story – and has become a term of art in fiction writing as well. A Big Bad is not, necessarily, the nastiest or even primary villain of the piece, but could be the…
I Could Build a Dog, or Two
— Part Two of A Tale of Puppy Poop and A Roomba A few weeks ago, I shared with all of you the consequences of letting a Roomba run wild at night when the puppy has deposited a little pile of poo in its path. In the days that followed, I continued to tinker with…
A Tale of Puppy Poop and A Roomba
Today’s topic seems self-explanatory. It was not the topic I had intended to write about today, but when I woke up at 5:30 this morning and found what looked like a crime scene in my kitchen, I decided to purge my system here. Sorry about that. I will spare you the before picture. Two things….
Let’s Talk About Sex
Each Saturday, we take turns writing about our process, experiences or works-in-progress as we set about writing our Great American Novels first novels. We’ve told you that we describe our genre, or sub-sub-genre, to be contemporary romantic suspense. For the purposes of this post, the emphasis is on romantic. Or, more accurately, scenes of physical…
“It Was A Dark And Stormy Night”
After “Once upon a time…”, that’s possibly one of the most famous first lines in fiction. A great first line will get me every time, whether it’s a novel, a biography, a blog article or a Facebook post. Maybe it’s my journalism background from the time when the lede was all-important: who, what, when, where…
Being Real
A few days ago I read a blog post, Are You a Writing Fangirl…Or a REAL Writer? 7 Ways to Know. It made me wonder, not only about being a REAL writer, but about being REAL. How often are we simply playing pretend? Not only as aspiring writers, but in life. Look at social media….