A Right to Die July 30, 2008

I had never read a Nero Wolfe mystery before, though I knew his general story: the large man who never leaves his New York brownstone, tends his orchids, eats well, and solves mysteries by having all of the facts brought to him. Yet a fellow blogger had written of how much she enjoyed these stories, [...]

What’s in a name? July 28, 2008

More than I knew, apparently. In the novel I’m currently working on, The Sleep of Reason, I have named my protagonist/narrator Charles Frere. It’s an old name in my father’s family, and it presented itself to me early in my imaginings of the story. I had no thought about it beyond my willingness to use [...]

Tell your story once July 27, 2008

A bit of writing advice I received once went something like this: “Tell your story once, and tell it in writing!
The idea of this is that there is some internal, personal drive for fiction writers to tell a story. For some of them, verbally telling the story to friends or an audience (before it is [...]

Back on the trail July 24, 2008

I’ve let my third Finnegans mystery novel, Finnegans Afoot, lie fallow for a couple of months. I had finished the first draft back then and decided to walk away from it to get some creative distance. I’ve had a few ideas for enhancing this or developing that. I’ve made some notes and tinkered with sections [...]

Chapter four put to bed July 23, 2008

I have chapter four of The Sleep of Reason finished in first draft. The writing went really well, though I’m certain I will need to revisit it to punch up the creepiness factor. I had intended the tone to be stronger than it currently is, but all of that will come to me, especially as [...]

I can read without moving my lips, July 21, 2008

. . . but sometimes I do anyway.
Reading my writing aloud is a proofreading technique I commonly use. I don’t suppose I’m the only one who has thought of this, but I’m glad I did. For me it is quite effective.
I have a tendency to write almost the right word when I’m dashing out the [...]

Chapter Four begins July 20, 2008

I’ve had a great start with chapter four of The Sleep of Reason. I managed to write more than four thousand words in my first session with it, and that only covers about a third of what I hope to accomplish in the chapter.
My pre-writing approach continues to delight me. I had sketched the chapter [...]

Ancient origins of sleep July 19, 2008

I noted in an earlier post that the novel I am working on, The Sleep of Reason, began as a short story many years ago. The original work is at least five years old, and I think it is actually much older than that. (I could check my old journals to nail down the date, [...]

Painstaking research July 16, 2008

In the buildup to the climax of my novel Finnegans Afoot, my protagonist, Ann Finnegan, stumbles while on a hiking trail and cracks her knee on a rock. She also bruises her forearm in the fall. I did this to put her out of commission so she wouldn’t go with her husband on a hike [...]

Who makes these rules (and why should we care)? July 15, 2008

A thousand years ago, I was part of a group of wannabe writers who met each month. We read each others’ short stories and then proceeded to critique them. None of us was published at the time, and we seriously spoke of someday learning “the trick” to getting our stories accepted by the literary magazines [...]