First of all, I want to explain my position, which is a somewhat unusual one. I live in a country which is not the country of my birth, and doesn’t even use the same language (Japan is where I live, and the UK is where I lived up to 24 years ago). As a result, I tend to feel a little out of things – correction – I do feel very out of things, when it comes to contemporary society in the UK. Of course I return to Britain at relatively regular intervals, but not for long enough to absorb the culture in such a way that I can write meaningfully about it. After all, I left the UK when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister – she’s a name in history books now. John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown all came and went without my assistance. Continue reading “Culture and writing style by Hugh Ashton“
Reggie Ridgway always dreamed of becoming a writer. An avid reader from an early age, he found a wonderful escape in stories. He did not start out in life as a writer, After graduating high school, Vietnam happened and after 7 years as a medic in the Air Force, he went on to study medicine. Then life happened, a wife and two children kept his dream of becoming a Doctor on the back burner. He did manage to get a BA in computer science while holding down a day job as an x-ray tech in Southern California. He taught math and computer programming in a local junior college. Writing a novel was still something he always wanted to do and after some encouragement from his creative writing professor, he began to write. His first novel is out on Amazon and his second novel is being shopped around for representation. He is inspired by Peter Clement and Michael Palmer who write medical thrillers, and likes to infuse his experience working with computers and in the medical field into his own blend of high tech drama. He lives with his wife in a house which looks out on Lake Isabella, in Southern California, where he derives much peace and inspiration.
His current title is In the Midnight Hour:
Doctor Jonathan Anderson is having the worst day of his life.
Forced to resign from his prestigious position as chief of surgery, he goes home to find his wife in bed with another man. On the brink of suicide, his wife tries to wrestle the gun from him and is accidentally killed. Convicted for her murder, he finds himself in prison, but after managing to escape, he ends up in the same hospital he ran, this time as a patient.
Hell-bent, Anderson seeks revenge on those responsible for ruining his life. Things are not as they should be, and a series of murders ups the stakes, but despite the work of two committed hospital employees and the investigating detective, the identity of the murderer and the motive for the heinous crimes may come too late to save any of them.
“A fast paced thriller with good story points and characters which are believable and worth reading about.” Author Scott Nicholson says. “You won’t want to go to the hospital again after reading In the Midnight Hour.”
This book is available from Amazon. You can find Reggie on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and learn more about him and his writing from his blog.
Today we have the book video trailer for Lisa Winkler’s Black History/biography: On the Trail of the Ancestors: A Black Cowboy’s Ride Across America.
A fascinating Black History memoir tells the little-known six-month adventure of an African-American cowboy who rode horseback from Manhattan to California.
On the Trail of the Ancestors: A Black Cowboy’s Ride Across America is available through Amazon.com.
[This article is part of a series by author Lin Robinson on the subject of so-called “rules” of writing. You can find the other articles here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.]
In this series I have mostly dealt with negative “rules” — adjurations to avoid the use of various parts of English speech that are perfectly useful.
In this final article I’d like to switch to debunking several “positive” kinds of “rules”: concepts which are urged, even pressed onto writers as necessary, but which I’d suggest you drop not just from you tool kit, but from your vocabulary.
The Myth Of “The Protagonist” — One of the most repeated and most utterly useless concepts for writers is “protagonist”. It’s a word that does absolutely nothing for you, and can mess you up. Perhaps you’ve seen newbies wailing, “Can I have more than one protagonist?” (And in screenplay circles, sometimes get answers like “OK, if it’s a ‘buddy movie'”, or “OK if it’s an ‘ensemble’ movie”, otherwise no. How about love stories. Do you really have to make one of the pair the main show and the other one subsidiary? How about a story of two rivals? But they’ll tell you that you have to because that’s the way it is and who are you to argue with Aristotle? Continue reading “Breaking the “Rules” Part 5 by Lin Robinson“
