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The Furious Five Hundred
It’s a busy week for me for several reasons, one of which my house is being remodeled and every room is in disarray. I have no place to sit in my own home. Despite that, I’ve been camping out at the coffee shop for the past few days and I’m getting work done. I’m using…
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How I build my vocabulary
If you’re interested in building your vocabulary, feel free to apply some or all of the technique I use: Go to Dictionary.com and sign up to receive the word of the day by email. Go to Flashcard Machine and create an account. You can, however, use any online flashcard website. When you receive an email…
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A point of view on first person point of view
Well into a draft of my novel I realized I suffered from info-dump-itis. I know better than to do this, but I had such a great world I had created and felt the need to cram it down the reader’s throat. Every scene told the story from a different character’s viewpoint in third person. As…
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Who has time to write a blog? No one.
I’m at the coffee shop eating my oatmeal with walnuts, brown sugar and raisins. I’m thinking, “I want to write that blog entry on why I switched to writing my novel in first person.” But first I have a class I start teaching tonight and I haven’t outlined the syllabus. I need to mulch the…
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I survived bootcamp
I feel like I’ve grown the most as a fiction writer due to some spontaneous decisions I’ve made. One of these was doing National Novel Writing Month on the first day it started. I made a split decision on November 1st to write a 50,000 first draft of a novel by November 30th. And I…
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Shower Concert
How great is it to cut loose in the shower and sing your head off? Here are the most popular requests when I do a shower concert, in no particular order (laughing is not allowed): “The Closer I Get to You” by Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway. Yes, I sing both the girl and boy…
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My reading this past year: 2011
If you know me, you know that I love to read. It seems when I find out someone else likes to read, I feel an instant bond. When I find out that we like to read similar genres, that person feels like a long lost cousin. When I find out that someone has read some…
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New Year’s Revolutions for the Mind
In 2012, I promise to . . . Not take myself so seriously. I will laugh at myself at least once a day and encourage my friends to join me in the chucklehood. Try harder to see things from the other person’s perspective. I will realize that not everyone has lived life in the save…
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Work from home!
This kind of sounds like me a long time ago. I wrote 100 short stories I’m glad you’ll never see Some learning tips from this article: “The one consolation through all this was that my stories did improve — slowly — and I was just aware enough of my shortcomings as a fiction writer to…
My Projects:
