The Girdle of Melian

RiTE CLUB is on! Hosted by DL Hammons, who had an awesome analogy the other day about black ice writing (the kind that makes readers skim your story), WRiTE CLUB : "embodies simplicity, good-natured competition, and a lot of fun. Over the course of twelve weeks we’ll be holding weekly bouts to determine winners that will advance to the play-offs, which will ultimately lead to a single champion. Bouts between who... or what... you ask. Anonymous 500 word writing samples , submitted by anyone who wishes to take part, that's who. The submitted samples should be identified only by a pen name of your choosing (be creative) that nobody has ever seen before. The writing can be any genre , any style (even poetry) with the word count being the only restriction. It's a way to get your writing in front of a lot of readers, without having to suffer the agony of exposure. We'll start accepting these submissions today and will continue to take them during the entire twelv

hank you blogger friends! Thank you to Gina at Diary of a Writer in Progress for the Fabulous Blog Ribbon and the Be Inspired Award ! And  Melanie at Feather Pens, Tartan Dreams  for the Illuminating Blogger Award ! I always have trouble with the passing on the awards part - everyone's got such colourful, detailed, entertaining, exciting blogs! Pick up an award or ribbon if you happen to have come by - perhaps you'd like to mention my ongoing Show me the Words! contest - there's still time to enter ! It seems all I've got to do is share one random fact about myself. Actually, I've got Ten Things I've Done That No One Else Has ! One of the items off that list was: While working as a girl friday at a fashion magazine, I gave myself the authority to pull an ad just days before publication, because they had spelled Hemingway with two Ms ! I called the company and suggested it'd be better if they changed it... Speaking of Hemingway,

xcerpt! Adam tagged all of us who caught his post in the Lucky Seven meme (he's got some great teaser snips, go see!). The usual, go to page 77 of your MS, 7 lines down, then share the next 7 lines . Since I've been fulfilling half my ROW80 goals, of drafting for Fred and Lyne's story, I'm going to share from that. Except it's all in a notebook at the moment, so there is no page 77. I'll go with page 7 instead; the first ever bit of the story that's been typed! Fred is in the midst of telling Lyne about the curse that turned him into Beast... "'We were twins, but my brother came first, by two minutes. And when we were 21, my father told us of the curse. All down the line, every generation, that's when they were told. Some tried to fight, either before the change or once they'd become the beast. All failed. 'You haven't asked yet why I went to Lady Cockerell's masquerade that night. I didn't go because I was igno

ad news this week: Donald J. Sobol, creator of Encyclopedia Brown , has died : "Encyclopedia's success wasn’t only due to his problem-solving prowess. Credit his best pal (and girl Friday) Sally Kimball: older, stronger and sometimes smarter. She also could stand up to Bugs, and was Encyclopedia's bodyguard. That was a novel premise, to give that role of “the muscle” to a girl." I wasn't great at solving the mysteries, I have to admit. But I loved going "ohhhh, of course!" when I finally read the answer. I've always loved mysteries, and tried my hand at writing a murder mystery short story a few months ago. The storytelling itself needs major editing, but I think the mystery is intriguing... Speaking of mysteries, I finished Clarissa Draper 's The Scholes Key the other day. three of the books I've read this month "All across London, single mothers are vanishing. Margaret Hill, mother of two, walks out of her house and

ait Nolan's been plagued by plot bunnies recently, and I must say, so have I. I haven't touched Ayten's story in a couple of weeks now, poor girl, and I haven't even returned to my actual plot bunny story featuring Rosa and Baha (and, okay, Ayten and Devran are in that one too). But I have been plugging along with my shiny new idea, which is why I'm glad I made that part of my ROW80 goals. This one's set in England, possibly Wales or Scotland (I've got to decide on a definite location soon, if nothing else for the accents of my local secondary characters ( I need a seaside location with a network of caves and lots of local legends (well, that part's not hard in the British Isles))). One of my other shiny sparks involves the Earl of Rochester ; it'll be a long time before I get around to delving deeper into that idea, but meanwhile I've got a history crush on him. However, I discovered something interesting: all I've known about R

he other day, Nathan Bransford had an awesome post about Jonathan Franzen . Apparently, Franzen causes contention here and there; we've dissected Franzen on the writers' forum before, more than once . I've only read The Corrections and, I have to say, I wasn't bowled over . The characters and story left me cold. Here's what I said on the forum: "When I read about helpless characters in (for instance) Steinbeck, I do not have the constant impulse to fling the book against the wall. With Franzen's characters, it was all I could do to rein in that impulse. I can not abide indecisive lily-livered people in real life, and certainly cannot bring myself to empathise with an entire book full of them. Characters who constantly refuse to speak up about their own desires, who constantly subvert the hopes and thoughts of others, and who leave a wasteland of pointlessness behind them. Ick. I realise that all this only goes to show that despite myself, Franz