As often as Show, Don’t Tell is drummed into us, it’s not always clear how to do it. Telling is sometimes necessary, even desirable in a sprawling novel, and the impulse to perform corrective showing can lead to page-count creep…
For the past two years, I’ve been steadily working on a middle grade novel about a lonely 12-year-old girl in small-town Wisconsin who meets four siblings with a dangerous fantasy world. While I was under no illusions that I was…
Who cares? I ask myself this question a lot these days in the wake of an election, a year, that left me, and so many others, feeling lopsided. For years, I’ve used writing and reading as a way to cope….
We at Dead Darlings are aware that it is 13 days past New Years, but some of us are just recovered from our annual Bacchanalia, and others are so sad with S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder) that it’s taken us this…
It wasn’t until I joined in National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) a few years ago that I finished a full draft of a novel for the first time. For anyone unfamiliar with Nanowrimo, it’s a national challenge to write a 50,000…
Like many writers, I’m quite introverted. I like quiet. I like a room of my own, a state of low stimulus equilibrium. I’m a listener more than a talker; a watcher more than a doer; risk averse, rather than a…