I’m excited and honored as of this morning to join the SleuthSayers gang for a monthly blog caper. SleuthSayers is both a favorite blog I’ve followed and a well-respected collaborative of some seriously talented short mystery fiction writers. Special guests, crime fighters, the works. These folks are long-established across genres and with longer works,…… Continue reading ForSleuth! I’m Onboard SleuthSayers.
Category: This Whole Writing Thing
Seconds: “First of a Fine Spectacle”
Did you know Russian empress Catherine the Great wrote operas? She did, badly, or so goes her history. Anyway, back in my own when came an anthology call for Catherine the Great stories and here she was upon research having tried her imperial hand at librettos. I wrote it, a comic romp. Got a yes.…… Continue reading Seconds: “First of a Fine Spectacle”
Stagg, For The Little Guy: Behind “Lord, Spare the Bottom Feeders”
You never hear much about river mussels. That’s even in comparison to other bivalve mollusks. While a river mussel sits in that stream bed cleaning gallons of fresh water daily, water you and I and countless animals straight out of a Disney film depend on, who gets the attention? Clams. Clams have restaurants and packaging…… Continue reading Stagg, For The Little Guy: Behind “Lord, Spare the Bottom Feeders”
Title Fight
You can do a lot with fiction. You can remove all narrative or all punctuation. You can go stream of consciousness and remove spelling norms and paragraph breaks. Cormac McCarthy removes the dialogue quotes. Do it right, and you can remove most everything in fiction and still have terrific writing. Except for one unavoidable thing:…… Continue reading Title Fight