Mark Pleiss & April Warnings The first novel from Mark Pleiss is called April Warnings and it’s a series of interconnected stories set in and around Baxter County in Nebraska as a twister bears down. The narratives are connected by the Midwestern ritual of going into an underground tornado shelter, the disappearance of a young…
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Deep POV Lesson 11 – MRUs
MRUs? Huh? An MRU is a Motivation Reaction Unit. It’s a term coined by the inestimable Dwight Swain, and it’s a magic key to keep your reader immersed deep in the story. It may not be DEEP POV, but it’s closely related. So, I’ll just give you a taste and send you off to Google…
Rocky Mountain Writer #179
Chuck Greaves & Church of the Graveyard Saints Chuck Greaves new novel, The Church of the Graveyard Saints, is a literary mystery with a love triangle and an eco-thriller finish and it’s also the first novel Chuck has written that’s set in and around his adopted hometown of Cortez, Colorado. On the podcast, Chuck tells…
On the Nature of Ritual
I think humans must have created ritual as soon as they started forming tribes, maybe before. We seem to do it almost without thinking. We tend to think of ritual as something involving religion. Catholic Mass. Pagans casting a circle. Celebrations of midwinter and new beginnings like birthdays and weddings. Even something as simple as…
Real Writer Life Top 10
1. Check out this fantastic piece in The New Yorker on the land-based writing habits (and more) of Herman Melville. Melville felt he had all of Moby Dick in his head and just needed to write it down. By the way, if you’re writing fiction, I hope you know you already belong to the same…