Harry Potter blogfest: Who would be your mates?

Thanks to Michael DiGesu at In Time... for hosting today's Harry Potter blogfest.The concept? Select two Hogwarts students you'd choose to be your best friends and describe what...

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We interrupt our regular schedule...

This week, I'll be straying from my usual Tuesday, Thursday, Friday routine to participate in some blogfests.Would you like to join me? Here are the details (and my schedule):Wednesday,...

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What is success?

I think we're all aware of our dark-side tendency to envy. The comparison game can be insidious and soul-killing. One of the most helpful pieces of advice on that front came from...

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Make them turn pages with this simple trick

You've heard it over and over--readers, agents and editors love "page turners." So you work hard creating characters that readers will invest in and worry about, engage them in...

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Jazz up your revision process

Many approach revision as if it were the literary equivalent of housecleaning. You sweep away redundancies, throw out excess adverbs and dialogue tags, donate some unneeded subplots...

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Hitchhiking with Dr. Who

If you could hitchhike with a Time Lord aboard the TARDIS, where and when would you choose to go? Would you decide, like Rose Tyler (companion to Doctors #9 and 10), to go back...

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My best St. Patrick's Day

Just for fun, I thought I'd post an entry from one of my high school journals describing my experiences marching in the St. Patrick's day parade in Dublin, Ireland. I haven't...

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Are you prepared?

It's tax season and this year I had the distinctly frightening experience of doing a Schedule C for my husband. See, he got paid for writing a chapter in a book published in 2010...

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Stylish Friday

Fellow poet/fiction writer Alberta Ross was so kind as to pass along the Stylish Blogger Award to me. Thanks, Alberta!The rules of this one are to share seven things about myself...

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How does real change happen?

Why do stories that turn on a simple epiphany bother us so much when we encounter them in fiction? Probably because they feel so fictional. In real life, insights are a lot easier...

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The arc of anticipation

Twice a year, my spiritual tradition gives me the opportunity to live inside a story arc in anticipation of our major holidays: the Advent/Christmas season and the Lent/Easter...

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Win-win: read great lit for charity!

The fine folks at The Literary Lab have released a new anthology this week, entitled Notes from Underground, including work by one of my CPs, Simon Larter, and blog followers...

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Short stories: notes from the trenches

I've been on a short story jag lately: writing, revising and most of all, market research. I'd mentioned a few weeks ago that short stories can be a great way to make use of excised...

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