Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Writing”
“Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once.” ~Stephen King Maybe neither do titles of those books. But a book needs a good title. Maybe even better than good. Something catchy. Something that makes a reader wonder and yet know at the same time. The right title can entice you to open the cover. I’ve had over forty …
“A cloudless plain blue sky is like a flowerless garden.” (Terri Guillemets) Ah, the beautiful sky. And what can make the sky even more beautiful? Clouds, of course. And their shadows floating over the mountains. Just as a sky needs clouds, so do stories. Beautiful blue sky and fluffy cloud scenes are good in a story. But wait. A story …
“You’re not stuck, you just forgot you can change your mind” ― J.R. Rim A few posts ago, I invited readers to ask me a question that they might have asked if they could have been at my book event and taking part in my Q & A time. I love the Q & A time of any talk. People …
Since The Innocent is on e-book sale right now for 99 cents for a limited time on Amazon, I found this post written a few years ago for a different blog when the story was newly published. I rewrote the piece to bring it up to date to share how a story can come to life for me. When I’m ready …
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” ~Albert Einstein I had my book party Saturday. It was fun. It would have been even more fun if all of you could have been there the way Lavon was. It was so neat that she and a friend were able to come hear me …
Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble. ~Yehuda Berg How many of you, as children, learned the …
Not long ago, I did a talk at the LaRue County Public Library. I’d never been there before, but a friend, actually a cousin a few times removed as people say, lives there and got the library events person to invite me. I was pleased that some people were there to hear me talk about books. Then I was excited …
What word is almost universally understood no matter where in the world you might be? That word is OK, and yet in the history of words, it is relatively new and a word I sometimes avoid in my historical stories. It isn’t OK to let my characters speak words nobody would have said in whatever time period is the setting …
“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” — Louis L’Amour And Louis L’Armour knew how to turn that faucet on. This is a record of his work. L’Amour eventually wrote 100 novels, over 250 short stories, and (as of 2010) sold more than 320 million copies of his work. By the 1970s …
A few years ago shortly after I published my first Shaker book, The Outsider, I talked to a book club in Washington state. They were having just their second meeting as a book club and they had picked my book. They must have contacted me to have a call-in at their meeting. I’ve always thought being in a book club …