Having long been interested in the Holocaust, I was eager to read this book after I read the synopsis. Sarah’s Key starts off with a ten year-old girl who hides her little brother in a hidden cupboard in her bedroom with the naive assumption that the French police were going to allow her and her [...] 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 »
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 »
Scrapping NaNoWriMo This Year
I started this year’s contest with the best intentions, but it just didn’t happen. Every time I launched my word processor, my mind would immediately focus on the rewrite of Shades of Evil, even as I stared at the words of the outline I started the weekend before the start date. My progress on that [...] Read more »
Writing Progress: Shades of Evil
The rewrite is going very well so far. I’ve just finished the second chapter and plan on starting the third sometime this week. So far, I’ve established (re-established, if you read Prosperity) that Amanda is clairvoyant and that people often get squeamish over the subject, depending upon their religious beliefs. I’ve also established what she [...] 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 »
Experimenting with the Mind Map Technique
Introduction Mind mapping is a brainstorming technique that has been around for decades. I first heard about the concept in high school, when one of my teachers asked us to draw up a mind map of a chapter in our text book. He didn’t explain it very well, and therefore most of us blew it [...] Read more »
Book Review: Barefoot
This was the third book that was chosen since I joined a book club in April. What’s funny is that all of the women, with the exception of myself and my friend who invited me, love romance. I’ve tried to read romance novels in the past, but I can’t get past the sugary, flowery descriptions [...] Read more »
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