foundations for a writing office I’ve been tweeting about the lovely little getaway house my husband and I have been building for the last three months. I am pleased it’s coming along, but what I really care about and am excited about is my office. Sure the house is going to have bedrooms, a living…
Put on a record. I was dropping in on my various social medias and stopped long enough to check my email and get caught up. I saw a newsletter post Molly Green had made a couple weeks back about being your own support, cheerleader, life fixer because we lose those that do that for us…
Live in a dome; artistic flare w/off-Earth life I love this idea: terraforming with a shell or dome to hold the atmosphere in and generate heat. That makes use of local planets like Mars, Venus, and various moons as liveable space very doable. Miriam Kramer’s article “Incredible Technology: How to Use a ‘Shell’ to Terraform…
Let’s face it, Ernest Hemingway does everything right, so I could focus on a variety of qualities in his writing and gain insight. But for the purpose of this post, I am giving my attention to his use of theme, so I am turning to the high school standard read The Old Man and the…
Time links past with present Harper Lee had quite a task creating the narrative voice of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Sure Scout was a six-year-old girl who ages about two years in the course of the book; what’s the challenge? Seems easy enough — in that short span of years there is not…
building character from within The variety of ways one can convey a character’s viewpoint are many and challenging. Dialogue, other character’s viewpoint, narrator, info dump and internal thought as a type of dialogue and first person speaker and then imbedded thinking stuck right inside the narration. I find such character reveals, when done well, a…
John Steinbeck wrote for and about the guy next door, the man that works to pay the bills at the end of the month, for the poor cuss who hopes and hopes even when hope is lost, and loses and loses, even when he wins. Tortilla Flat He moved slowly and cautiously. Now and…
Door to the inside of a monster John Gardner’s Grendel is a work of delight and derangement cluttered in one diabolical monster’s mind. It is poetry garbed in prose, sophistry hiding behind a misunderstood, disadvantaged descendent of Cain. Gardner slips his monster into the reader, building sympathy and support as the beast twists its words…
