RAZORED ZEN

As a helpful guide to my blog visitors, I have constructed a list of things that one can safely assume about writers. As a writer myself, I...

I gave a test today (March 30) and four people missed it. One emailed in sick; three others were going on a university planned visit to a g...

Warning: No problems are actually solved in this post. You spend a good hour crafting a dramatic scene. A family comes home from a pleasa...

Villains! Readers love to hate them. Writers have to have them; in most fiction they are as indispensable as the hero. But how do you dra...

My writing group talked about how readers identify with characters last night, and one member commented that people are most likely to ident...

Friday afternoon I get the call. My 19 year old son and one of his running buddies have been arrested in New Orleans for graffiti--caught i...

I heard them last night. I woke up around five in the morning, tired but unable to go back to sleep. And so I wandered in the darkened hou...

It's been a heavy work week with little time for blogging, but I finally managed to catch up fairly well last night. Teaching can be a ...

Ending a book well is hard, but it's perhaps the most important part of the writer's job. The reader has stayed with you through th...

I was out for a walk today. I love the country, seeing the trees, hearing the wind rustle the leaves, having my eye caught by a splash of g...

Sid posted about Book Mooch some time ago and I recently got around to joining. So far, so good. You get points for uploading books that ...

Here’s the deal on the post I made a couple days ago on sympathetic versus unsympathetic characters. In my story, I had a woman whose son w...

Writers Beware! Be careful what you google. I heard a report today of a man who'd been murdered with a bullet to the head, then dismemb...

My writing group had a spirited discussion last night about the elements of sympathetic versus unsympathetic characters. It began when I de...

Susan had a post today about her inner critic, although she refers to said critic as "bitch." I had a visit from the critic last...

Our house has become even more Critter Central here lately. As I've mentioned, we throw our food scraps out back, close beneath the win...

I found a great quote from Charles Darwin yesterday regarding a visit he made in old age to his childhood home. The person who owned it whe...

My writing group got on the subject of "tense" the other night. I was talking about the piece I'm working on in present tense...

I'd heard about the book Self-Made Man , but had not given it much thought until last night. A woman named Norah Vincent spent a year a...

Michelle posted a piece on her blog today about an interesting nightmare that she had. It made me think of my own nightmares, of which I...