We travel a certain amount in our family—partly because my husband is a community manager in the computer industry and organizes a lot of conferences, partly because my son loves O’Reilly Media’s Maker Faire, which is held within a few hours’ drive of our house, and partly because we live… Read more“4 Reasons My Cat Can’t Be a Writer”

We’ve been running a grammar expose this month: tackling first third-person singular pronoun and then the ever-popular (or -unpopular, depending upon your point of view) of serial vs. Oxford comma. So now let’s go after that other big issue that continues to plague writers, which plaguey behavior—unlike the behavior of… Read more“Grammar Expose: That vs. Which”

Last week we talked about the third-person singular pronoun. So this week let’s stick with our grammar expose and tackle another question that I continue to be asked, even though the answer is simple and has been established for a very, very long time: Serial vs. Oxford comma Luckily, I… Read more“Grammar Expose: Serial & Oxford Comma”

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”—Margaret Mead #NeverAgain: Hundreds in Victoria Add Their Voices to Students’ Call for Gun Safety Yesterday, my son and I attended the March for Our Lives here in Victoria,… Read more“March for Their Lives”

I don’t usually futz around with grammar issues here, but this one came up and it’s kind of an exception, so I’m going to give you a little grammar lesson today. You all know me well enough to know I don’t make too many grammatical howlers, and you probably also… Read more“Grammar expose—using ‘they’ for third-person singular”

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the demise of blogging, which was brought home to me by a friend who said, “Just when I decided to start a blog I was told blogging is over!” At the same time we hear more and more in the… Read more“2 Things to Consider about Blogging & Books”

Hey, guys, I just spent the entire day trying to develop video for this blog. Guess what? That’s right. So let’s talk about how my experiment with video mimics the experience of writing fiction: It always seems like such a good idea at the time Who has not begun a… Read more“10 Ways Writing Fiction is Like Performing for a Camera”

I’m going to introduce you all today to my grandmother, to whom I was very close and who gave me most of the instructions that now guide my life. If you can’t say something interesting, don’t say anything at all This, of course, is not what she really said. But… Read more“11 Things My Grandmother Said About Writing”

We’re on a huge vintage authors hunt here this month. We’ve discovered Melville Davisson Post (thank you, Elisabeth Grace Ford) and Rafael Sabitini (thank you, Donna Montgomery)! We’ve talked about great names (Doomdorf and Rafael), brilliant historical setting, gripping character dilemmas, authentic details, the perfect story structure for which we… Read more“The 3 Creators of Our Mystery Genre: 3 Real-Life Mysteries”

Last week we talked about reasons to love Melville Davisson Post, the great nineteenth-century mystery author of the backwoods of Virginia. In case you’re new here, that conversation was caused by a post I did that was all lurid, over-the-top covers of vintage mysteries. And that post was caused by… Read more“4 Reasons to Love Rafael Sabitini & Freddie Mercury”