Just before I took off for Texas on Friday night, I received this email from Andy and Riley:

Texas has been nice — between the friends, family, and weather, it always is — but I am definitely looking forward to being with my boys again.

Today I stumbled across this article about Common Faults in Short Stories. At times the author is certainly harsher than I think is necessary, but he has a lot of good tips. After reading his list, I couldn’t help wondering if I should rewrite “The Tenth Time” yet again…

I also took note of his advice on being funny:

I think humour only ever exists in something that sets out to be serious. Anything that sets out to be humorous is doomed.

Aha! Perhaps that’s my problem!

2114 words

Note: This piece was written nearly 10 years ago for an Anne of Green Gables fanfiction contest. I did not create any of these characters — that honor goes to the wonderful imagination of Lucy Maud Montgomery — I merely borrowed them to indulge my own storytelling, because I love Anne and her happy world so much.

Incidentally, this story did win the contest.

:)

Finally it was summer. Anne could feel it at her very core. Each one of her senses delighted in some pleasure that was tied completely and exclusively to summer. Her eyes feasted on the sight of lilies in full bloom, and her pretty nose reveled in their exquisite fragrance. The warmth of the sun danced on her skin. Her ears strained to hear the robin’s tune as it wafted out from the Haunted Wood. Her tongue felt giddy when Marilla allowed her to sample ice cream at select church functions. At times, these combined joys overwhelmed Anne with such a great sense of summer that she feared she might die — happily — right then and there.

Continue reading →

My morning writing sessions have been going pretty well this week. It’s certainly much easier to focus when Riley crawls into my lap and sleeps. Before, I had to keep him in the corner of my eye at all times, since I was never really sure whether his whimpers meant that he needed water, wanted to play, or was five seconds away from peeing on the carpet.

But then again, his adorable snuggly-ness compels me to hug and kiss and pet him a lot, which somewhat reduces my productivity. I guess you win some, you lose some.

Speaking of which… A few months ago, I sent one of my stories to Junot Diaz, the fiction editor at the Boston Review whose first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has been quite the success both with critics and the public. He responded personally, which is wonderful and rare, and one of his comments was that my story was “strong but young.” (See the win-some-lose-some connection there?)

Continue reading →

Apparently The Pilgrimage link is not working right now (and I was only on page 15!) so I’m reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods online/free instead. Feel free to join me!

Edit: The Pilgrimage is back up! Yay! Now I have 2 free books to read. :)

Paulo Coelho has released another of his books online for free: The Pilgrimage. This is a limited time offer*, but I still think it’s fantastic and everyone should take advantage. I certainly am! (A free book? What more incentive do I need?) You could call Coelho a phase for me right now. You could also call it obsession. Both would be true.

–

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I have a focus problem.

Continue reading →

This past week has been chock-full of reading, and I’ve loved every minute of it. First I finished The Witch of Portobello, another wonderful Paulo Coelho book. I’ve realized that his style is essentially “fable meets self-help book,” and I like it. I don’t think it’s something I’d attempt to emulate within my own style, but imitating it might make a good exercise.

Last week I finished his book The Zahir, which is my favorite of his so far. The characters are very rich and engaging, and their plights are more “normal” than in the other two books. But The Witch of Portobello had a better (twist!) ending, like The Alchemist.

The rest of my reading consisted of excerpts from the 10 finalists for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest.

Continue reading →

Every day is a chance to make your dreams come true.

The thought occurred to me the other day, and I believe it. So I should be practicing it.

I did send pages 1-50 of The Good Daughters to Wilkes University’s James Jones First Novel Fellowship (contest). We’ll see how that goes…

In the meantime, I’m going to see if I can start pushing myself to stay up later writing. It’s probably going to be a painful adjustment, but at this point, it seems necessary.