I attended a Writer’s Conference in the early 1990s on the “up and coming plots” for the future, the ideas that a writer needed to focus on to sell. I felt slightly insulted but very infuriated by this “author” to whom I’d paid $90 for a bunch of bull and a mass of malarkey. His contention was that the readers of the future were persons of certain specific ethnicities. “Target them. Write for them. They’re where the money of the future is.” I raised my hand and this author pe

The time has come for me to buy a new laptop. I have worn out another keyboard. In addition, the battery of this HP has conked out. I...

20 September 2013 One weekend during this past summer I took a much needed break from composing the first (and hopefully only) draft of...

In the essay entitled “Unplugged,” I stated that I do not recognize the names of most current “actors” and “actresses.” It is indeed...

Sometime during the middle of February 2009, while I was just beginning the draft of what was then named “Nottingham,” Dear Reader sent...

It has been en vogue for quite a while for various musicians, especially guitarists, to become “unplugged.” They play their songs that...

14 July 2013 Guy de Maupassant, the prolific, successful short story writer par excellence, was but one of a sizable number of...

Friends want to know how I work -- what I do to get “the creative juices flowing.” Husband said it might be the subject for an essay. I...

This poem by the American poet Robert Frost has long been a favorite of mine. It speaks to a star but could just as easily have been...

I bounce fictional and non-fictional ideas off of my very dear friend through emails, and I have told her that I come up with the best lines in our emails. She enthusiastically agrees! I am not aware of the literary quality of the statements when I make them, but I inevitably add a reply: “I can use that line.” She responds: “It’s a good one!” I, in fact, found “my voice” for what became THE DAWN while communicating with this friend during the tumultuous summer of 2008. I had

It can be a problem, falling in love with a main character. I typically have avoided this pitfall by stepping into another one: feeling...

I once had a rather hostile relationship with the chicken. I would bake several chicken breasts and then, after they cooled, one of them...

When I worked at a federal agency in the 1980s, there was an official memorandum pinned to the cubicle wall of an engineering technician....

I recall vividly this lecture from Professor Claeyssens. Eyes widened; head cocked; nod in my direction; slow, intriguing, deep voice:...

When “Nottingham” was in its earliest stages of being “conceptualized” – the heady moments of characters and their names “coming” to me, and the beginnings of a plot line forming (although the line was hardly linear at that point) – 1994 was well underway. I was trading hours for money working at a Montessori preschool where my daughter finally accepted the setting, personnel, and surroundings (this preschool was “our” third attempt) as an acceptable alternative to being with

The blank page: it looms before you. For some writers, it is a wave of emptiness that must be dodged quickly, thereby snuffing out the...

Spring 2020: The very first essay that I posted on my new website, “Suffering for One’s Art”, remains as true and cogent as ever. ...