Note: A version of the following post was written for Ireland Writer Tours. The week I had been invited to spend in Ireland leading discussions for a group of writers, in September, has been canceled. Ireland is still struggling with variants of the COVID-19 virus; there weren’t enough participants booked to make the week work….
In early June, I attended Lit Fest, presented by Denver’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop. I’ve participated in several craft workshops as part of the Lit Fest offerings in past summers, but this was the first year I decided to apply for an advanced placement course. While I’ve learned from all of my critique groups and workshops—with…
As a mystery novelist, I tend to be cavalier about murder—most authors are. The typical fiction writer thinks nothing of crafting a scene of mayhem. Death comes easy. Books on writing and writers’ workshops traditionally refer to eliminating unnecessary characters, wonky plot-lines, or even unruly sentences as “killing your darlings.” As media consumers, we’ve viewed countless…
When I was a computer programmer, a co-worker and I were taking the bus to our respective homes after work. It was rush hour and the bus was full, so we were standing. We started taking about the project we were working on. After a few minutes a man sitting in the seat next to…
Last month I “attended” the virtual StokerCon 2021 conference, run by the Horror Writers Associarion. If you see a conference run by the “[genre] Writers of America” or “[genre] Writers Association”, you can count on there being a lot of panels on writing, editing, publishing, marketing, and other writing-related topics. And that, friends, means it’s…