Literary Hodgepodge

November Hodgepodge – Being a Writer

November 11, 2012
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Don’t, please, get precious about your working methods. . . . The more you humor your inadequacies by compensating with phony environment, the tougher your work will become. You have to be in a mood. I grant that. But if you haven’t the understanding of yourself to be in any mood when you wish –…

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October Hodgepodge for Writers

October 5, 2012
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“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten – happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.” – Brenda Ueland, American writer (1891–1985) “I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.” – Ray Bradbury, American…

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More Kindle, Schmindle – Further Thoughts on Books, Stories, and Pages

February 27, 2012
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I’m still not convinced that eBooks are as successful literary devices as print books are, or even that they have as great potential. (They have other potential – speed and info abundance and portability – but they fall short, I believe, in pure storytelling impact.) Compare how differently each stimulates the use of brain, especially…

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Writing-World.com Review of How To Write Your Best Story

August 13, 2011
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Here’s a link to a recent review by Moira Allen, editor of Writing-World.com, of How To Write Your Best Story. Here’s a bit of it: What [Martin] succeeds in doing, admirably, is not only describing some of the elements of good storytelling, but describing them in such a way as to model good storytelling in…

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Memoirs – Fact, Fiction, or “Truthiness”?

June 1, 2010
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Some might disparage the memoir as unverifiable history – perhaps inflated or poorly remembered facts from the past. Memory may indeed be seen by historians or journalists as somewhat inferior, flawed, imperfect history. But as a folklorist and a book editor (currently editing several memoirs), I want to encourage you to consider what memoirs do…

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Kindle, Schmindle – Hey, I Love Real Books

January 14, 2010
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No, I don’t hate the idea of a Kindle, or a Nook, or a Sony Reader, or any other e-book readers out there. And I’m not a card-carrying Luddite. (That’s a trick question: Luddites wouldn’t carry a printed card, would they?) In fact, I’ll probably publish a title or two in 2010 in e-book editions…

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December Hodgepodge (On Creativity)

December 15, 2009
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“When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures.  So I did ten times more work.” – George Bernard Shaw “The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B.” —James Yorke, mathematician “The best sentence? The shortest.” – Anatole France, French poet and novelist, winner…

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In the Treehouse of Imagination

December 11, 2009
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When I was a kid, maybe 3rd grade, we lived for a brief while on the outskirts of Evansville, Indiana. I remember two scary things about that home. One was a deserted house I had to walk past to get to the corner where the school bus stopped. It was the kind of empty place…

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Fantasy Literature and the Writer’s Itch

July 26, 2009
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“I write to relive the itch in my head.” So said American fantasy author N.D. Wilson, author of Dandelion Fire and 100 Cupboards, a wonderful emerging trilogy (set in Kansas) for young readers (and up!) who enjoy Harry Potter and the great works of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. I have to admit, that “itch in…

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July Hodgepodge – Creative Names and Cars

July 5, 2009
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I’ve been driving cars around the block. Lots of them. I’m car shopping, looking to replace a venerable Suburu wagon that almost made it to 200,000 miles, but sadly stopped short of that celestial goal in a cloud of smoke a couple of weeks ago. Accordingly (hey, that’s a Honda pun!) I’ve been studying the…

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