Authors Electric

  It was a rainy and cold day in Roxborough when my future husband, Dave, and I went to see a new movie at our local movie theater,   Rushmore,   the first film to be in wide release from director Wes Anderson. I was already pretty loaded in on our relationship because my husband wore Doc Martens, wrote and drew satirical comics, and liked some cool music. When we came out of the movie I felt even more in love, with my husband, with life, with the world in general. I was vibrating. So, there was no question of what I was going to do last weekend: I was going to go see Anderson's newest movie,   The Phoenician Scheme . It was everything I could have hoped for, weird, hopeful, sad, funny, well-acted, well-written, and the set was amazing, as were all the props, details, etc. The postcards were absolutely gorgeous, and how many films have you been to where there are postcards? I will say this, having seen  The Phoenician Scheme,  I do think Wes Anderson is mak...

  Okay, so, first off, the link if you're interested in learning more:  https://www.bookcritics.org/emerging-critics/fellowship/ Secondly, to my second point, why is it important to be a good reader and read good books? Of course, you already guessed the answer, because it makes you a better author. When I do work as an editor, I see less expert writing very often, and, after decades as a college writing professor, I had already had a lot of experience with that. When writing is not at its peak, there can be a lot of reasons for it. And, unbeknownst to you, I had just written a long-winded explanation about that. And then, following my own advice, I read it over, and decided less is more; screw the lecture. So, to be a better writer on your own, read better books, and then study them, and then ask yourself, "What makes this writing so good?" That's the meat of what I want to convey here. Now to stop blathering away, and give you one small example of what I mean. One o...

I was invited to be a speaker on a few panels last weekend at the California Creative Writing Conference , one of which was on world-building. I'm old. I admit it. And back-in-the-day I don’t remember us calling it world-building. Part of that is, I think, because all authors of all stories world-build to a certain extent. For me, the world begins within the character. And, crazy as it may sound, I think of that when I look around me, right now, at my little desk in the corner of my bedroom. And there is the Brownie doll my brother gave me for Christmas when I was six. And there is my movie poster from  The Darjeeling Limited.  And there is my orange cherub lamp, on my wooden desk with the pipe legs, and I sit in a wide-backed wicker chair like a minor Bond villain. It is my world. It exudes from me, which sounds slightly gross, I know, but it does. I have moved house a fair amount of times in my life, and, once in a new place, tend to shake the whole thing up at l...