The idea you had for your next book looked really great. After all, each book is supposed to be better than the last; your skills as a writer are growing. You set yourself a new challenge, one that would grab the attention of your fans and garner the respect of your fellow writers. You have 20,000 words already written. But now you encounter a problem and you’re stuck. What to do? Continue reading “When It Just Isn’t Working”
Tag: Writing
A Failure to Communicate
Everyone knows that readers have subject preferences. Not everyone will like a story even if it is very well written. It is not literary failure if someone doesn’t like your story because they don’t like that kind of story. It is failure if a reader normally likes the kind of story you wrote, but doesn’t like yours. They don’t have a beef with the editing or the grammar or the genre or even the idea of the story—they just did not like what you wrote or the way you wrote it.
Where most writing fails, it does so because the original idea of the story the author wished to convey to the reader gets lost in translation.
Remember that writing is one form of communication. There are four parts to communication in writing: Continue reading “A Failure to Communicate”
Stop the insanity – Using the right words in the right places
I’m not big on posting boring lists, but today, I’ll make an exception. We all run across words, phrases and issues from time to time, that don’t make a lot of sense. Okay, I’ll come right out and say it, they are flat out WRONG. I don’t consider myself an expert on grammar or proper use of words so I’ve kept an ongoing list of the top pet peeves/mistakes I’ve made in the past. Here we go and, hopefully I hope, you’ll find a couple that will help.
Let’s start off with my biggest offender in the early days. My first manuscript was full of this one. Continue reading “Stop the insanity – Using the right words in the right places”
Ed’s Casual Friday. How it feels.
Non sequitur –
Let us call it a hazard of the driving profession.
But say you are heading east from Glendale on the US 60 – or as it is also known, the Superstition Highway – and let us say you are behind the wheel of a Mercedes Benz 600 Limo with a v12 lurking under the hood. That’s right. Twelve cylinders. Twelve cylinders nobody actually uses, as a limo does start-and-stop traffic downtown, idles at stoplights, parks in lots outside posh restaurants and seedy houses on the south side. The car never gets to growl. Never gets to sow its oats. But this is 11:30 PM on a Friday, and every officer of the Phoenix law is downtown seeing traffic safely out of the ballpark, and more power to them. The Superstition is just that. Dark. Empty.