Beginning writers face many obstacles. Recently, someone asked for advice in a writing group online. She wanted to write novels but said everything stays a draft because she feels too insecure to continue and doesn’t really know what she’s doing. Further, each time she writes something, it gets criticized, causing terrible self-doubt. She said she…
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Why is the journey through a historical novel so different from regular reading? Because for that brief time, YOU ARE THERE! In the 1950s and 1960s, CBS featured Walter Cronkite narrating a history series that teachers especially fell in love with. Dramatic presentations of historical events put the listener or viewer into the scene…
I pondered about writing a Christmas blog with meaning. It’s well known that the holidays are unbearable for some and joyous for others. The same can be said for any day or event of the year, yet it seems to exacerbate during the Christmas season. Truthfully, it has always been that way. Whether the reasons…
Route 66 is twenty-five hundred miles of pure Americana that meant the world to people living in the 1940s and 1950s. Though officially taken out of the U.S. Highway system in 1985, it continues to generate nostalgia and give birth to new generations of travelers who long for the old glory days of Route…
Did early Americans invent embroidery to make samplers and decorate hope-chest items for hopeful young ladies waiting to become wives and mothers? Hardly! The art of embroidery started in China thousands of years ago. China began to weave silk from silkworm cocoon fibers about 5,000 years ago. Producing silk fabrics and silk threads inspired the…
If you’re addicted to scarves, you should know a lot about knots right? That’s true for the main character of the adventure-mystery trilogy, SILKI, THE GIRL OF MANY SCARVES. Silki’s favorite danger knot for tying her ever-present scarves end to end is the Double Overhand Stopper knot. In this example, on a very dark night,…
If you grew up without television, you’d probably think watching chubby red ants bringing treasures home to their anthills was loads of fun too. Luckily, we had tons of anthills to scope out on our Arizona ranch. If I stood or squatted on a rock beside the mounds and didn’t wiggle very much, the ants…
These days, it’s popular to think of oneself as a “Rule Breaker” … a “Rebel;” and, to some extent, that’s fun and exciting. Truthfully, where can we as writers hedge and when must the rules be doggedly followed in order to be accepted by the readership we’re trying to reach? Grammar and Punctuation Ironclad I…
Don’t Come Into My Backyard “Write in your own backyard!” seemed to be the cry of the masses when I was shifting from being a non-fiction business writer, journalist, and essayist to a fiction writer eight years ago. Yet, my heart and mind wanted to write an adventure-mystery novel featuring a Navajo protagonist. I…
A journalism and corporate writing background conditioned me into thinking I was ready to swim out to the Island of Non-Fiction and string up a nice hammock between two palms. I’d drop a lobster trap off the rocky side of the island, carefully keep my matches dry, and write thought-provoking non-fiction forevermore. I would pen…