geek girl

As a romance author, I’ve written quite a few short stories and read even more.  I’ve read short stories by industry authors as well as the “classics” by Edgar Allen Poe, O. Henry, Richard Matheson and Stephen King.  In addition, I’ve read anthologies of short stories.  As an author, I feel that I am in a constant state of learning and try my best to expose myself to a variety of writing and writers. There was one thing I noticed about the good short stories:  they didn’t explain me to death.  Nothing bothers me more than a short story that tries to tell me every detail of each character’s back story in the first three paragraphs.  It bores me.  It bogs me down.  Ditto to the over-explanations after each character does something. “She brushed her hair, something that she had done for years and her mother had done before she… Continued

A big thank you to those who stuck with me through my kind of blogging marathon.   I didn’t make all my days as planned, but I’m pretty pleased what I did accomplish.  Blogtoberfest was a huge help in getting my blogging off the ground, planning posts ahead of time and most of all, sticking to a schedule.   Now, I feel I can roll into NaNoWriMo with some purpose and determination. How did I do it?  I pre-wrote a lot of the posts.  Then, I decided, for it to be a true Blogtoberfest, I should make an effort to blog every day.  At times, real life intruded, but to be honest, if I am going to be a writer….this IS part of my real life.  Treating writing as a job rather than something I merely dabbled in, I learned, is the key to making it work for me. Your mileage may

Yes.  It’s a Stephen King story.  No, it’s not one of the ones that have been made into a movie.  However, I will tell you right now, even thinking of the story…it is one that I’ve read twice and not one that I will come back to any time soon. It’s a story about a shipwreck, just like Cast Away, but King grabs your hand and forces you down a path to make you closely examine the situation:  You are stranded on a desert island with little hope of rescue…and little food.  How far will you go to survive? You’ll see what one man’s desperation will lead him to. The story is not available as a stand alone, as far as I know, but as part of Skeleton Crew, an older selection of stories that are King at his best, at least in my opinion.  (Not that it matters, really,