My intentions started off on the right foot. I wrote 710 words within the first week. Then some health issues knocked me down, which forced me to focus more on some paid venues once the bills started arriving in my mailbox. I’m feeling much better now, but there is no way I can catch up. [...] Read more »
Book Review: The Things that Keep Us Here
While the cover is beautiful, it doesn’t depict what this book is really about . . . a mother trying to keep her family safe from the H5N1 influenza pandemic. I found this book sitting on the shelf at my local B&N, immediately mistook it for a mainstream fiction novel and picked it up anyway [...] Read more »
Character Development through Voice Journals
Alan Rinzler posted a great article about character development, using a technique from James Scott Bell’s The Art of War for Writers, called voice journaling. His article inspired me to practice with the characters I’m writing about. I figured that I would start off with the easiest character first, since I already know a lot [...] Read more »
Horns: An Imaginative Take on Hell and Revenge
Ig Perrish wakes up one morning with a nasty hangover and discovers that he has grown a set of horns on his head. He isn’t sure what happened to him and why people are suddenly opening up to him with their evil thoughts and intentions. All he knows is that his life is a living [...] Read more »
Shutter Island: A Wonderful Mind-Bender
Although I had heard Dennis Lehane, due to his bestselling Mystic River, I had never read any of his books until I picked up Shutter Island. In truth, I would have never thought to read it until I saw the movie previews on television. The previews gave me the impression that the story had some [...] Read more »
Duma Key: Satisfyingly Creepy
Stephen King draws a lot from his experience with his accident when he fleshed out the character of Edgar Freemantle. Freemantle was the owner of his own construction company until a crane crushed him inside his truck and changed his life forever. If you want to learn more about the plot, visit Amazon to get [...] Read more »
The Girl Who Played with Fire: Better Than the First
If you haven’t read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo yet, don’t worry. Larsson gives the reader good, short summaries of what happened to Salander and Blomkvist in this sequel. That said, I recommend that you read Tattoo first so that you can get a better idea of who these characters are so that you [...] Read more »
Book Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
I had been wanting to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for quite some time. So when it became my turn to select the next book for my book club, I decided to choose this. It’s the first book of a trilogy written by Swedish author, Stieg Larsson, who passed away shortly after delivering [...] Read more »
How to Draw a Basic Mind Map of Your Characters
Knowing the Basics About My Characters Before I start writing my stories, I have to know the basic attributes of my characters: Who are they? Where did they come from? What event brought them into this story? What are their attitudes and why? How will they solve the problem in this story? Will they grow [...] Read more »
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