The death of Creativity?
My Labor Day reflections on creative writing: Creativity is not dead, though we unwittingly conspire to starve it. We writers are killing our own children, and why? To conform to [...]
Water Ghosts at the BEA
Here we are in New York City at the Book Expo America, Bob and I. Today we're looking forward to having lunch with Rick Spilman, fellow author and founder of [...]
Practicing the art and craft of writing with Pulitzer Prize winners
While digging through old files today I came across a few chapters of an unfinished novel I brought to the the Napa Valley Writers Conference, eighteen years ago. My workshop [...]
Water Ghosts, the cover
Here it is, the cover the professional design team came up with, based on my suggestions, and targeting a young adult audience. I really appreciate my writer friends who critiqued [...]
Dead Wake, Dead On
Sinking ships make for sensational stories and Erik Larson’s Dead Wake; The Last Crossing of the Lusitania does not disappoint in that respect. Yet this historical account of the 1915 [...]
The Versatile Blogger
Versatile Blogger Award My writing-friend, Antoine Vanner, author of The Dawlish Chronicles, thrilling naval-based fiction set in the "heyday of British Empire," nominated me as a "versatile blogger." Antoine's [...]
The important second draft
The first draft is where we capture the heart, the guts, the essence, and the power of our story. But first drafts (at least MY first drafts) are awkward, self-absorbed, [...]
The Princess Taiping — doomed Ming-era warship
photo by Cara Chow (Charlotte1125) - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons A few weeks ago I wrote about Intrepid Dragon, the Chinese junk [...]
The Brain Storm of Words
In the last two posts I shared an important part of my writing process, the initial “brainstorm” or uninhibited first draft. I actually posted the unedited beginnings of a speech [...]
Tell Your Story; part 2
Tell your Story (continued from yesterday's post) Nursing made me a better writer because it gave me a subject other than myself to write about. A different perspective. It gave [...]