(To be sung to the tune of “A Pirate Looks at Forty” by Jimmy Buffet) Mother, mother blank page I have heard you call. I’ve wanted to ride on your potential since I was three feet tall. You’ve seen it all. You’ve seen it all. Watched the folk that wrote you switch from page to …
Today, I want to talk about something called “Crutch Words”. If you’d asked me about what those were prior to my Whirlwind* tour of conventions and writer’s retreats, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. I’d have had a good guess, maybe, but that’s about all it would have been. A Crutch Word is …
Well, this is new. A middle-of-the-week post? My schedule got all muddled over the weekend, so here we are. Right on the heels of ConCarolinas, I went down to Beautiful Lake Wylie, North Carolina for my yearly writer’s retreat. My writers group (We collectively refer to ourselves as the Roaring Writers) does this once a …
I got back from Balticon this year, I was on the ground for two days, and I took off again for… ConCarolinas ConCarolinas was the first convention I have ever attended and it is completely the fault of the Magical Words family – and I do not use the word “Family” lightly. Although I don’t live …
Before I get started, I want to take a few seconds to send a wish to all you fathers out there: Happy Father’s Day! May your “To Do” list be lighter than mine, your grill more bountiful, and your beer colder…though not too much colder. Frozen beer isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. So, …
Hi there, Everyone! Just a quick note to let you know where (and when) I’m going to be during the convention. There was a small kerfluffle with scheduling and I am waiting to hear which panels I will actually be on. Honestly, though, I’l probably still attend them anyway. I’m going to take the stance …
Before I get down into today’s post, I wanted to mention that I’ve got a Links page! Yes, There probably should have been one a long time ago. What can I say: (Still learning…) I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about today. Some weeks, the topics come easy. Other …
When I wrote my first post about writing and music (which you can find here) I thought I had said all that I had to say on the subject. Yeah, right. Simply thinking that I was done should have let me know there was more coming, sometime. Two posts on a topic don’t constitute the …
What do I know about music? The short answer is: Not a hell of a lot. I know that there are 4 beats to a bar, and I know some chords as related to the guitar and that’s about it. That’s just the nuts and bolts stuff. A conversation about composition gets me in over …
Three days ago was the deadline for submitting my story to Faith Hunter’s* Rogue Mage anthology. I’m happy to say that I got it in ahead of schedule and under the maximum word count. But there were days where I had my doubts. So I thought I’d take an honest look back and try and …
Read more “How a Short Story is Born a.k.a: The Price of Power – What the Heck Happened?”