Showing posts with label Raymond Chandler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Raymond Chandler. Show all posts
Saturday, April 23, 2022

My Mom's Yellow Bikini

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A couple of years back I had a dream where I saw my mother in a motorboat tied to the pier of a mountain lake. She was a young woman at the ...
1 comment:
Thursday, April 21, 2022

Getting out of the way

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“Sometimes the story knows what it’s trying to say, and your job is to let the story speak.” I said this to a student this morning. He had t...
Thursday, January 13, 2022

Highs and Lows

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This has been a week of highs and lows. I finished a manuscript I began a year ago, which capped a nice couple of months that saw me get a ...
Monday, September 13, 2021

Sometimes less is more

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John Corrigan's post a few days ago about short novels resonated with me. My crime reading tastes were honed by Ed McBain and his 87th P...
2 comments:
Thursday, August 26, 2021

Sentences: The Intersection Between Reading and Writing

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This summer, I read a handful of books I enjoyed, books that landed in various ways for me. When I read, I’m highly aware of authors’ prose ...
Thursday, August 27, 2020

Take a break to add tension

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This week has been a busy one. School kicks off, in a hybrid version, I published a pedagogy article , and got about 3,000 words of fiction ...
Thursday, June 18, 2020

The importance of advance readers’ questions

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How do we know if a story will work? Isn’t that the central question, the one that keeps writers up at night? Will my story hold water? Will...
Monday, August 26, 2019

Literary Lush Legends

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Since alcohol figures highly in my Geneva Chase mysteries, I thought I’d devote a little time to booze and writers. I’ve long heard the my...
3 comments:
Thursday, December 21, 2017

Christmas Lights and Second Drafts

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Christmas is upon us –– the season of good cheer, good food and drink, and time spent with close friends and family. For me, it’s also a tim...
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Friday, January 27, 2017

When Mary Met Raymond

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Mary Tyler Moore died on Wednesday, and I cried. I was surprised that the death of a woman I had never met hurt so much. Maybe because altho...
4 comments:
Thursday, May 26, 2016

WHO NEEDS RULES?

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“There are three rules for writing a novel," W. Somerset Maugham once quipped. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” Anyone who...
1 comment:
Thursday, April 14, 2016

Looking to the Master for Solutions

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I'm 50 pages into a novel due in August (I know, don't say it), and to make matters worse, I hit a roadblock this week. I don'...
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Friday, April 24, 2015

Been There, Going Where?

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Frankie, here. Finally, getting a chance to sit down at the keyboard. This week has been busy, and that brings me to my topic for today'...
Thursday, April 02, 2015

Finishing Strong

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The end is in sight. My work-in-progress, Fallen Sparrow , is (fingers crossed) three-fourths completed. I've read and re-read and re-re...