We have all faced the excuses. They are so tempting, especially in the busy times in life. For me that’s right now. I’m spending my weekends at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival leading people around the grounds and helping them find things. The garden is getting past the growing stage and I have a lot of … Read more
Writing “In the Dark… We Hope” has been a multi-layered challenge. First and foremost, the very premise of the book scares me. To be honest, if it wasn’t for the fact that this book has been pestering me to write it for more than 10 years, I wouldn’t be writing it now. It’s just that … Read more
I am a writer. Sometimes I feel like I have to defend this basic premise of who I am. I am a writer because I write – most days in fact. I don’t always write a lot, but I get the words out of my brain and into the computer. Therefore I am a writer. … Read more
Avoid cliches like the plague. That’s one of the “rules” of writing. I’m going to take a deeper look at this rule today in my periodic series on “the Rules of Writing.” Using cliches is a piece of cake. Over using them is as easy as falling off a log. Poor use of a … Read more
There are numerous jokes in the theatre world about motivation. There’s a rather famous one in “Noises off” when the director tells a character to take the groceries into the living room. “So, What’s my motivation?” the character asks. The audience knows that the motivation is that someone else just went into the kitchen and … Read more
I recently spent the a weekend, well six days really, in the company of close to 6,000 fellow geeks. At CONvergence science fiction convention – 4 days of convention plus set up and tear down. It was a wonderful break from the pressures of the real world – the world that tells me daily to … Read more