“The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.” (Anonymous) On the surface of things, it might sound like I am still in the same place I was the other day with my post about grabbing a reader’s attention with the first line: Start Here. I began this morning thinking about what today’s post would be about. To encourage my thinking I went outside to work in the garden, and the neighbor’s dog nearly convinced me to write about him – and about the couple that pulled their car up outside my […]

“In the beginning, heaven and earth were created, and in the beginning you should move them to get off to a good start.” (Jack Webb, author) Most of the people I know start reading fiction at the beginning of the book. That’s where you’re supposed to start, right? That means the beginning has to be good. It has to reach out and grab the reader’s attention from the very first sentence, the very first paragraph. But how does an author do that? She catches the reader’s emotions in the first instant. Generally, we’ve all been taught to begin in medias res: […]

I’m late posting this, I know! I know! And instead of posting a “how to,” I’ve been working on the cover and the formatting of my short story, and it’s done! Yay! I am super excited to announce that In the Mirror is now available for free on Smashwords in all major ebook formats. My wonderful and talented sister MarshaLee did the drawing for the frame on the cover. Please visit and download it! If you like what you read, please consider mentioning it to your friends and passing the link along. If you would leave a review of the book on […]

Fridays are my “anything goes” days. Fridays are the days I blog about whatever tickles my fancy. The subject will vary. Wildly. It could me, or it could be you. It could be a book I’ve read, a movie I’ve seen, my garden, artwork, the kids that soaked my garbage can (sitting out at the curb patiently awaiting the arrival of the sanitation truck) with soda pop…   Today it’s a story. A flash of fiction.   I hope you enjoy. 🙂   ———÷——— Matt felt like a gopher. On all sides stood towering mountains of projects that needed to […]

Does your story seem flat and lackluster? Give it a little sparkle and engage your reader by engaging their senses! We are all born with five senses – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling – and yet we are often so frequently caught up in our day-to-day lives or in achieving a word count goal that we tend to overlook those vital elements, both in our writing and in our living. Have you ever been reading a story about a beautiful, placid forest and perhaps smelled a hint of the sweet brook tumbling through? That is the power of the mind. […]

Inspiration: the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, esp. to do something creative. I have had days – and plenty of ’em! – when I have felt particularly unimaginative, pedestrian, and even downright spiritless. Sometimes I call it ‘writer’s block.’ Sometimes I just cave in and describe it as depression. It’s easy to blame my lack of creativity on outside sources. What is not so easy is finding a way to open myself to the boundless sources of inspiration that surround me. Alan Baxter gave some excellent pictorial examples in his article, Real World Inspiration For Fantasy and […]

Today hasn’t gone according to plan at all – but I’m not complaining! I spent a lovely time outside doing some much needed gardening. That lasted until the neighbor came outside with a radio and ruined the peace and quiet. Indoors again, I popped over to FaceBook before knuckling down to do some writing and/or editing, and there was my daughter, inviting me out to lunch! Sweet! I’d already had lunch by that time, so she grabbed a burger and we went over to Yogurt Nut (Mmmm, frozen cheesecake yogurt with blackberries!). The weather was so incredibly perfect that we […]

Character creation — and development — is probably one of my favorite aspects of writing fiction, and I’m not talking about how tall or short, muscular or rotund, striking or unlovely an individual might look. Bogging down an introduction with a catalog of a character’s features is distracting; it focuses the reader’s attention on them rather than drawing him to look deeper, though looks do not, in most cases, make or break a story. While looks can help to give some hints about a person or help to give them color in our imaginations, it is the qualities distinctive to an […]