I wasn’t planning to blog today, but then I saw this article on Facebook. Since nearly 100,000 others were talking about it, according to fb, chances are good that you saw it too. If you don’t want to read it right now (though I’d recommend doing so at some point) the premise is this: Life is…
A few weeks ago, in the post about setting, I shared with you a mnemonic I used with my students to help them remember the important parts of a story: Cows See Pretty Sunflowers. Cows = Characters See = Setting Pretty = Problem Sunflowers = Solution All these things are necessary to have a good story.…
A way cool review of Drake and the Fliers came out today on the site Talk Nerdy With Us (cool name, huh?). I’m not able to reblog directly from there, but I wanted to share the review with you guys, so I got permission from the author, Tracy Miller, to copy and paste it here.…
This week, the hubs and I will celebrate our anniversary. Our 13th anniversary, to be exact. Our marriage is officially a moody teenager. You know how each anniversary has a meaning that goes with it? Like the 1st is paper and the 25th is silver? I looked up the 13th, half expecting to discover it’s…
If you dig into a writing group, you’ll likely discover two camps: short story writers and novelists. Short story writers specialize in a greater number of short pieces of fiction (let’s say up to 10,000 words), while novelists spend their time writing fewer long works (an “average” adult novel is 80,000 – 100,000 words). Writers…
I need to write from my heart today. Last spring, cancer took my grandmother. Last fall, it took my other grandmother. Last night, it took my friend. I wrote this as I lay awake in the darkness early this morning. I didn’t write it to win sympathy from anyone. I wrote it as a promise…
Back when I was an elementary school teacher, I created a mnemonic device to help my students remember to include all the story elements in their retells: Cows See Pretty Sunflowers. I didn’t say it was a great mnemonic. But it worked. Cows = Characters See = Setting Pretty = Problem Sunflowers = Solution They drew…
Meet Meeker. Meeker is an eleven-week-old Siamese mix kitten. He joined our family last Saturday. We’d been talking about getting a kitten for a couple of months, since one of our adult cats died. The remaining adult cat, Lily, seemed happy to be by herself, but it didn’t take long for the kitten talk to…
Nothing beats the feeling of typing The End following the last scene of your manuscript. You’ve spent weeks to months to years laboring over sentence construction, timeline details, and character development, among many other things. Now is the time to celebrate. Because soon, it will be time to edit. If you’re groaning, stop it. This…
Welcome to the fourth and final installment of the Drake and the Fliers prequel/serial. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the posts as much as I enjoyed writing them. If you missed the earlier posts and want to start at the beginning, click here. Before the Flight – Part 4 Drake held Kelsey’s fevered hand as…
Allison Maruska 