Chuck Wendig’s challenge was to write a piece of holiday horror. Well, I’ve been busy, really busy, so I’m trotting out a piece I wrote last Christmas for someone’s call for flash submissions. It is the first piece about Merry, who we saw in my piece The Good Girl....

Last night I met up with a half-dozen of my NaNoWriMo confederates at a well known coffee shop in my hometown. That’s three of them right there. Because I barely got them to agree to a picture (introverted writers!) I promised not to use their names. Organized by the...

Day 11 into NaNoWriMo at 9,500 words in I am seriously behind. Life happens. Kids have birthdays and there is pizza cake to make. Why pizza cake? It is a new thing. Some restaurant chain in Canada came up with the idea, and it spread into the U. S....

Not being a young person, I wake early, anywhere from 2:00 A.M. to 5:00 A.M. I get much of much of my writing done before the sun shows its perkily cheery face in the morning. I don’t drink coffee for health reasons, so all of this is powered my...

This is a weird one. We are to write: A horror story framed as a spam email. Right? Take that assignment, run with it as you see fit. How scary can you make a spam mail? That’s the challenge. I’d keep it to the shorter side — 500 words...

I was given a book to review, so here goes: Angeli – The Pirate, the Angel & the Irishman by Amy Vansant My rating: 3 of 5 stars I was given a free copy by the author in exchange for an honest review. If it were possible I would...

Chuck Wendig’s flash fiction challenge is to incorporate a color into the title of the story. Word count limit, one thousand words. Mine came in at nine hundred eighty-six words. Tripping the Black Ariel took the passenger’s small carry on and stowed it in the overhead compartment. She had...

It’s scary isn’t it? A famous creative person faces that dark part of him or her self and loses the battle. And the media in its collective hive mind wisdom trots out this line: Celebrity Loses Battle With Depression. It’s such a common media trope it’s just expected we’ll...

I recently read a blog post by an editor and writer who said that writers don’t need a blog. She advised that the time spent on blogging could be best spent writing. Yes, I said that correctly. I read this on her blog. Her previous entry was about building...