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…
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…
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…
No running water, no inside plumbing, no way to run to the store for bread, meat, or butter. The name of the game was survival. In our current world, it’s hard to conceive of what it’s like to feed a lot of mouths when you have empty pockets and no promise of help. In…
In the movie “Smoke Signals,” the main characters, Thomas and Victor, hitch a ride off the Coeur D’Alene Indian Reservation with a young woman who drives her car around the Rez all day in reverse because that’s the only direction the car will go in. I highly recommend this hilarious movie, and seeing it again recently got me to thinking.…
Unique Challenges Historic novel writing presents many unique challenges. Foremost, the writer didn’t personally live during that time era, or he/she lived in New York but loved writing about the Old West. Slick documentaries and photos often don’t go far enough to immerse the writer or the reader in the “feel” of that particular slot…