One great incentive to get going with your writing again after a layoff is a deadline. Every year about this time I use the deadline for submissions of short plays to the Maine Playwrights Festival to motivate me to pick up the metaphorical pen. Submissions to MPF 2017 were due on December 2nd. As with […]
Steven King writes in a smooth, easy to read, casual style that millions of readers love. Of course. The first section is truly a memoir of his early attempts to get published. A thousand rejections. So, even the masters don’t come out of the box perfect. It’s a familiar story, but still absorbing. Then, there’s […]
Authors are often asked where the story they’ve written came from. It’s a good question, and the answer can provide interesting insights into the way the story unfolds, and the form that the story takes. In the case of my new novel Missing Girls, the story rises out of a play I wrote that wasn’t […]
It’s My Turn I looked all over for a picture that would capture the essence of this post and settled on this one of Stephen King “at work” rapping out another novel. Stephen has sold over 350 million copies of his works. I have a way to go catch up with him, but this isn’t […]
Maine Playwrights Festival – And the winner is… One of the truly good aspects of the judging process for the 2014 Maine Playwrights Festival is the inclusion of comments from the readers of the play. This is the first time it has happened, and it is most welcome. Acorn Productions, the sponsor of the Festival […]
The Maine Playwrights Festival has been around for 14 years. It’s presented an annual challenge to create some new stage worthy thing or to bring out something you’ve been working on for a while. Whatever, it’s been a call to arms in a sense, if that can be thought of as a metaphor for […]
I’ve been working like the devil on my novel in progress tentatively named Transit of Venus and have let the December 15th deadline for submissions to the Maine Playwrights Festival creep up on me. It’s taken all the effort and skill I have to try to transform my full length play into a novel. It’s […]
`A while back I published a post on reasons why a writer should consider finding a novel in their finished full length play, but I hadn’t actually gone down the road of creating a novel that way, at least until now. I’m currently in the process of creating a novel based on the […]
I’m very pleased to welcome novelist and blogger Jeri Walker-Bickett to my blog in this Guest Post. Jeri’s motto “Make Every Word Count” is an apt theme for her blog (http://jeriwb.com) as it never fails to engage and inform her readers and followers in a variety of interesting subject matter ranging from book reviews, art, […]
Sherm Sharma and Melena Ryzick of the NY Times put together a captivating video about Caledonia Curry, an artist who also goes by the name of Swoon. She started her art career as a street artist who would do things like use bolt cutters to get into a fenced-in condemned building in order to plaster […]