Story Time: Elisavietta Ritchie

Lunch is served…

LUNCH TIME

by Elisavietta Ritchie

I’m wrestling this can of tuna. Not that I like tuna but he does and he’s out mixing concrete, says it would set if he stopped. His music so loud out there, he’d never hear me ask Help, he’d shout back to go –I won’t say what he’d say. Another reason I hate canned tuna — not just that tinny taste, though he grew up in a can-opener family –who knows if fishermen hauled in a dolphin. Stupid can-opener’s cranky. Rusty. Like me.

My Swiss Army knife in his toolbox. I use the long blade to cut bread, fish or bait, or all at once with a swipe on my jeans in between. Last week he snapped off my corkscrew. He’s that strong. Screwing around with this thick pry-hook you risk an artery or is it vein. Maybe those Swiss are trained for it, scared they’ll bleed chocolate or gold. Continue reading “Story Time: Elisavietta Ritchie”

No Wrong Way to Do It by Arline Chase

Someone responded to my blog on outlines, by emailing me to ask how I could write a story without knowing what was going to happen first?

That’s a good question. Well, I never have a detailed outline, or even a Triple-O. But I do know what the main character wants and usually what the general outcome will be. If I know that, I can sit down and write and the sub-conscious will take over and create the obstacles and bleak moment that shape the story.

If toward the end of the story, I find I need a “telling detail” to foreshadow something that happens later, I just go back and put that in. Continue reading “No Wrong Way to Do It by Arline Chase”

Practical Magic by DCS

Author DCS AKA Crystal Storm
Author DCS AKA Crystal Storm

As most of us writers do I’m always reading articles to improve my craft. There was one particular that has persistently stuck in the back of my mind when I think about this business called writing. Randall Silvis once wrote, “When was the last time you read something and thought, gee I didn’t know that about the human condition…for any reader with a few books under his belt and access to the nightly news, there is little in this world that can truly surprise us.”

While that statement may be true, as a writer with an over active imagination I feel that to take it to heart would be a sell out to my readers. How many times are we going to read the same ole story? When we pick up those books, aren’t we secretly hoping there will be something new inside those pages? Something a little different? Something that brings back that child like wonder and makes us rethink the world? Don’t we as writers owe it to our readers to raise the bar every time we put pen to paper? Stephanie Meyer sucked us in not with just a love story but with a slightly different twist on the age old vampire and werewolf’s tale. We stood in line for Harry Potter because we’d never been in a world quite like that before. When I sit down to write Synarchy I want to pull back the veil on the world you think you live in and show it to you through a new set of eyes. I want to squeeze your heart, and hurt your brain, and make you ponder the real possibility of practical magic. Continue reading “Practical Magic by DCS”

Tips for Better Google Search Results Using SEO Part 1 by Jen Smith

SICK by Jen SmithWhen I finished my book, SICK, and had it edited I felt like I had really accomplished something. Of course the dream of an agent was fluttering around in my brain like a beautiful brightly colored butterfly. I proceeded to write the most interesting gripping query letter I could possibly muster up and sent it out to eighty agents. Yup, that’s an exact number I carefully logged them on an excel spreadsheet. (geek) My beautiful dreamy butterfly quickly turned into an ugly moth as the rejections flooded in. Add the bad timing of Borders closing to the fact that agents now get hundreds of submissions sometimes daily, and I realized that I didn’t stand a chance. Borders was now sending back its entire inventory to the publishers at the cost of the publishers. That’s how it works. So no one was willing to take a chance on an unknown author. (I’m not ready to ponder the possibility that I suck as an author.) Continue reading “Tips for Better Google Search Results Using SEO Part 1 by Jen Smith”