• Keep The Action Going – Part II

    A few days ago I was exercising in the fitness facility at the apartment complex where I live, and turned on one of the TVs installed there.  I scanned the […]

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  • The Summer of 2019

    Well, the summer of 2019 is upon us and many things have slowed down.  People take vacations and try to get away from the hubbub of daily life.  Schools are […]

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  • The “Was” That Was

    Every now and then I run across, or am asked about, the admonition that new writers learn, to limit the use of “to be” verbs in their writing.  Instead of […]

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  • Keep The Action Going

    Lately I’ve been watching reruns of the TV crime drama “Major Crimes.”  I like the action as the detectives of the Major Crimes unit solve the case.  The show is […]

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  • High School–A New Perspective

    I’m not by any means a school administrator or teacher or school superintendent or member of a school board, though I do have a high school diploma and college and […]

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  • Mental Telepathy In Science Fiction

    I’m currently working on a story of about 23,000 words (that makes it a “novella” or “novelette,” depending on your definition) that has to do with humans from Earth who […]

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  • The Pikes Peak Writers Conference–2019

    The Pikes Peak Writers Conference for 2019, held yearly in Colorado Springs, was last weekend, May 3-5, 2019.  Here’s a few impressions and takeaways I gleaned from the conference.  Not […]

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  • Space Opera: A Definition

    I have had, over the past 20 years or so that I’ve been trying to write science fiction, and on one or two occasions, to answer the question, “What is […]

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  • TNR vs. Courier; Pica vs. Elite

    Do you remember “pica” and/or “elite” type on typewriters?  Way back when we didn’t have personal computers, and everything we wrote was either by hand or on a typewriter, we […]

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  • “House Made of Dawn”: Review and Commentary

    I’ve just completed reading N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, House Made of Dawn.  (It was awarded the prize in 1969.)  A beautifully written book, it is what I would […]

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  • The Hardest Part About Writing

    This particular post is directed largely to my writing friends, though many of you who are not writers—that is, writers in a more or less full-time sense—might get a similar take-away […]

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  • Stakes and Motivation

    A couple of weeks ago I sent the first 50 pages of the manuscript of my first science-fiction novel to a professional editor for evaluation.  It had been read by a number […]

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