August 2015

Vacation is over, most visitors have left and we have our city back to ourselves. Sitting in my backyard overlooking Chester Creek, every morning I see more leaves turned yellow. While it’s August still, autumn is around the corner and time for us to look for inspiring events. Here are some exciting possibilities to consider. 

“Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.” F. Scott Fitzgerald Emotion is among the few things we don’t have to be taught, assuming that all the normal synapses are firing. No one has to tell us how to be sad or angry or cart-wheel happy. So

“I’m in love,” says Reagan Arthur, editor of the eponymous imprint at Little Brown Books. “I can’t wait to see what happens next.” That’s how Arthur describes her response to exceptional books. Editors, agents, and readers often speak of books this way, with passion. Can this sort of book love be pinned down, described, analyzed?  Consider Anne

When we are convinced by qualities of character we cannot entirely reconcile, we are in the presence of mystery. ~Catherine Brady Recently I re-read Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, one of the finest American books of the past few decades. Some will disagree heartily; in fact, such was the prevailing attitude when Robinson completed the manuscript. In an interview

Long after dark, they got the last crab pot strapped down. Jim climbed over the load checking the lashings that held the stack, though it was dark already, the deck slick with sleet and more rain falling on the wind that rolled in off the Bering Sea.  The lights of town pricked through the night.

“Typically, when your mother starts to dislike your writing, that’s when you’ve really found your voice.” ~Abraham Verghese     Voice matters. A lot. “Voice is the number one thing that separates the published from the unpublished and, after that, the good books from the mediocre ones,” says Mary Kole of the Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Agent