Straight talk from the sisters about blood, sweat and ink
Kat, the protagonist (portrayed by Julia Stiles) in the film 10 Things I Hate About You, is not a likable character. Nor does she strive to be likable. It’s more the reverse with her; she’s intentionally rude, domineering, and opinionated. Since the film is based on The Taming of the Shrew, making her a bit …
Continue reading “10 Things I (Don’t) Hate About You”
Welcome to part two of Releasing Your Inner Poe. If you missed part one you can find it here. With fall rapidly approaching I’m hard at work on a few projects with dark gothic themes, but more on that in a future post. Since I’m struggling with the task of establishing the right balance of …
Continue reading “Releasing Your Inner Poe, Part Two.”
Gothic literature is delicious and deadly and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about it. It’s a literary form most people either love or hate. I fall in the love-it camp and I’m always hunting for great examples. I enjoy the old masters and finding new writers who rework the old tropes in fresh ways. …
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Mysteries were my first love. As a kid, I read every single Nancy Drew book in the library. Then I moved on to supernatural mysteries by Lois Duncan. I read and read and read – murder mysteries, romance mysteries, fantasy mysteries, sci-fi mysteries, action adventure mysteries – any story that was a puzzle for me …
Continue reading “What We’re Reading: July is for Mysteries”
Love it or hate it, the new Amazon Kindle Unlimited just made it easier for avid readers to sample a huge number of books while paying a fraction of the total cover price. The new program will give subscribers access to over 600,000 titles, many of them Indies, but also some big name authors. …
Continue reading “Could Your Book Make the 10% Mark?”
My kids learned just about everything from their ABC’s to their rhyming words from scavenger hunts. I wrote about some of my unconventional educational methods a few weeks ago. You can read more about that here. Our summers have always included puzzles, and vacations filled with gold panning, adventures and planting geocaching clues. We love …
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Last week I gave a few tips from The Oxford Inklings on improving your critique group. You can read that post here if you missed it. This week I want to share one of that group’s most valuable writing tips. The Inklings all advocated reading works-in-progress aloud. Historically this make sense, they were from a …
Continue reading “Reading Aloud: Why Hearing Your Book Is Important”
I’ve known about The Oxford Inklings for most of my lifetime. However, I didn’t become interested in them again until quite recently. For those of you who don’t know the story, The Inklings were an informal literary society and critique group that started meeting in Oxford during the 1930s. However, they weren’t just any group, …
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As summer sweeps in with its balmy breezes and hot temperatures what’s more wonderful than a steamy summer romance? Heather and Robin initially cringed when I suggested this theme, neither of whom would be considered a fan of the romance genre in general. And I’d have to agree to some extent. Many romance books embody …
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A bicentennial by definition is a 200th anniversary, although it is a landmark usually measured in years. Yet our bicentennial is barely one year old. Yesterday we posted our 200th blog post and while it might not seem like a momentous occasion to many, to us it is remarkable. We began this journey in August …
Continue reading “A Major Milestone! Our 200th Post!”