The I Won the Ellipses War

There are no hard fast rules for punctuation in the written American English language. If there were we would not need the Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press Stylebook, the Modern Language Association (MLA) Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing, or...

Can You be too Busy? Yes, But Bring It On.

I missed a blog update Monday morning. I’ve been busy. Sunday, the day I would have written the blog was packed. The Saturday before I helped a very sick friend. It was hot and muggy. Several of us spent all day packing and moving stuff. Hot sweaty work.We got...

The Terror of Having Your Work Read

Terror? I thought the whole idea was to get your book read. Well, last weekend, August 31 through Sep 4, I attended the CoKoCon in Phoenix, AZ. It’s a great little con and I like little cons. Phoenix was also hot, but some of the rooms were so cold that only the...

Road trip writer – Dream On

I took a vacation to attend a radio conference in Wichita, Kansas. I went with my friend from high school, we’ve been doing this for decades. I drove from the coast of California to Kansas city, MO, then to Wichita, KS. Over 4100 miles and used close to 100...

Editing is not fun

I just read a blog where the author of the blog said that editing is fun for her and should be fun for you. Someone should lock this person up, for their own good and ours. Writing can be fun. You enter a world where things happen, it’s not boring and if it is...

Don’t be a Lonely Writer

  Writing can be lonely. It’s just you and your thoughts. Those thoughts can be a world or a universe full of people, but they are all in your head. The other day I was barreling down the highway on the  way to a meeting of my critique group. John Tesh was...

The Roomba and the Writer

What does a Roomba and a writer have in common? Something that is way out of a writers comfort zone, advertising. In a ZDNet article dated June 15, 2018 Colin Barker mentioned that in 2003 the iRobot company built 250,000 robots. After black Friday 2003 they still had...

Are You Ready

This weekend I participated, with a group of fellow amateur radio operators, in an event called Field Day. Field Day is where you take your emergency equipment out and contact other amateur operators using that equipment. To increase emergency preparedness points are...

Looking for ideas in all the right places

I recently read an article titled Looking For Ideas In All the Wrong Places. I was disappointed. This article did give you places to look, but only three or four tired examples. The article mentioned a writer using Jane Austin’s Emma for the foundation of Fast Times...