What is it about ghost stories? They have been around forever and are popular all over the world. My indie publishing house, Third Person Press, decided to put together a ghost story anthology because we get more ghost story submissions than any other kind, too many for our other anthologies where we like to have a nice mix of genre… Read more →
Hey, we all know it. Writers sit too much. And the longer we sit, the more we read about how damaging sitting is. It’s enough to make us too depressed to exercise! But there’s no way around it, writing is sedentary work…or is it? No! Now we have: the Treadmill Desk! After coveting Sherry D. Ramsey’s treadmill desk for about… Read more →
Last year, an online acquaintance—Gary Henderson—from my Second Life writing group—The Quillians—got accepted to Viable Paradise Writer’s Workshop. I had never heard of it. I now know how “out of it” that makes me…but the point is that I finally did hear of it. I was impressed with what Gary had to say about it because if anything, his enthusiasm… Read more →
The thing I’m most proud of after successfully finishing NaNoWriMo is that I made no foolish pledge to blog everyday during the month. The first five days I wanted to. It was a good feeling to complete my main course and then finish off with a little blogging dessert. But after day five, the novel filled me up. I got… Read more →
We’re having perfect summer weather here in Atlantic Canada. Canadians do not say such sentences casually. We say it with the same emotion as someone would say, “I won the lottery!” It stays cold far too many months of the year for us to be anything but passionate about summer. Even better is that I’ve gotten to stay home for… Read more →
With apologies to one of my favourite writing physicians, Oliver Sacks, I titled this post, Seeing Voices, because that’s what it feels like when I’m fully engaged in writing characters I know well. So how do you come up with complex, interesting characters? Get them to talk. Engage them in conversation. Ask them questions not only about the predicament they’re… Read more →
Forty-seven endings. That’s the number published in this new edition of A Farewell to Arms (Scribner/Simon & Schuster, 2012) [I’d put a link to it, but there isn’t anything about this on their website. Really. Instead we have a book about sister wives and a Mick Jagger bio]. According to news stories, Hemingway said he re-wrote the ending of this… Read more →