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May 15, 2013
Mid-May 2013 - The Summer of 2008
I bounce fictional and non-fictional ideas off of my very dear friend through emails, and I have told her that I come up with the best...
May 1, 2013
May 2013 - Falling in Love with a Main Character
It can be a problem, falling in love with a main character. I typically have avoided this pitfall by stepping into another one: feeling...
Apr 1, 2013
April 2013 - The Chicken
I once had a rather hostile relationship with the chicken. I would bake several chicken breasts and then, after they cooled, one of them...
Mar 17, 2013
St. Patrick’s Day 2013 - The Memorandum
When I worked at a federal agency in the 1980s, there was an official memorandum pinned to the cubicle wall of an engineering technician....
Mar 1, 2013
March 2013 - Using the Self as a Source for Characters
I recall vividly this lecture from Professor Claeyssens. Eyes widened; head cocked; nod in my direction; slow, intriguing, deep voice:...
Feb 14, 2013
February 2013 - Incoming Signals
When “Nottingham” was in its earliest stages of being “conceptualized” – the heady moments of characters and their names “coming” to me,...
Jan 1, 2013
January 2013 - The Blank Page
The blank page: it looms before you. For some writers, it is a wave of emptiness that must be dodged quickly, thereby snuffing out the...
Nov 1, 2012
November 2012 - Suffering for One's Art
Spring 2020: The very first essay that I posted on my new website, “Suffering for One’s Art”, remains as true and cogent as ever. ...
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