I blame Julie Andrews. In The Sound of Music, she sings, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.” She makes it sound so easy, doesn’t she? Turns out, good beginnings are a lot harder to write than she led me to believe. I’m never taking writing advice from a singing…
You can’t make this up. I mean, my head is still spinning. Twenty-three years ago I wrote a novel called Killer Source. This was my fourth completed novel. I loved the concept. In fact, the idea came to me whole. I was driving on I-25 near Broadway, heading north, the moment it happened. I saw…
Writing lessons come from lots of places. We steal from other disciplines constantly, using terms like “architecture” to talk about plots, or “fleshing out” to talk about giving more details in scenes. Some of those terms are so ingrained in our vocabulary that we seem to think of them as idiomatic rather than what they…
Recently, I took a class from writer Alli Martin called “Writing Advice You CAN Ignore.” It was sponsored by the Orange County Library and offered for free over Zoom. From the get-go, I made several inaccurate assumptions about the class (you know the old saying about assuming). My first faulty assumption was that the Orange…
More awards, most of which no one has ever heard of. Training involves writing sprints, editing marathons and lots of literary gymnastics. Potential injuries include carpal tunnel, blurred vision and caffeine overdose. Even when you win, you’re not sure why, but when you lose, it was definitely rigged. Events take place in the corner of…