Sky the color of a dust storm. Susan Sontag once wrote “My idea of a writer is someone who is interested in everything.” I’ve been mulling this over a lot lately because I’m supposed to be spending so much time resting. If anyone has ideas about what to do during prolonged bed rest when you’re not supposed to use your eyes, please write me. And yes, I’ve just picked up a few audio books. I’ve been thinking about learning bird songs—a long-time interest I’ve never had time for before. As I plop down on my couch or bed, I’m typically listening to the radio where the punditry is speculating endlessly about undecided voters and I just want this election to be over and all our votes counted.

For those of you living in Oregon or southern Washington Paper Fort provides news and updates about Oregon's literary community, including application and deadline information about the Oregon Book Awards and Oregon Literary Fellowships.

And I know that I’m one cold-hearted dame, but if you’re interested http:www.alternet.org/electi is featuring an article, The 11 Dumbest Things Sarah Palin has Said. It includes her assertion that Obama is “palling around with terrorists.” I’d laugh if it didn’t make me feel like crying. And as Palin’s favorability numbers are dropping like a rock, apparently all is not lovey-dovey on the Straight Talk Express. Lately she’s been described by McCain staffers as a diva and whack job. What, she’s not happy with the stylist who is charged $11,000 a week to keep her looking hot? No mooseburgers available on the road? And I wonder what they’re calling the First Dude?

New words for the word list: prudent, man child, slog, rousing, grandstanding, plummeting, lurch, caprice, cred, jabbering, snippy, vacuity, musty sashay, ricochet, pummel, feckless, crutching (verb), guttering, endgame, sylvan, eggheady, baleful, hoopla, fancy-schmancy, jounce, vitriol, unflappability, kafuffle, hoopla.

Clouds scattered across the morning sky. Lately weather has been glorious here--sunny, warm, yet crisp, fiery shades everywhere. Author Mindy Neff advises writers: “In the category romance market, editors and readers are drawn to books with best-selling marketable hooks, but it's the extra spark in the writing, the attention to detail that will make your book stand out. Make sure all five senses are in play throughout the entire book. At all times you want the reader to see what the character is seeing, feel what the character is feeling, hear, smell and taste right along with them. Keep in mind that the character's perception of sense is governed by who he or she is--what is in their background. To one character, the smell of wood smoke might evoke happy memories of a family Christmas spent by a crackling fireplace in a cozy mountain cabin. To another, it might remind them of the terrifying night their house burned to the ground and they lost everything and everyone they loved.

This attention to detail will not only enrich your story, it will insure that each of your characters have their own individual voice.” Visit Mindy at her website: www.MindyNeff.com

Halloween is less than a week ago, so to celebrate this yearly spookfest, I want to direct you to Dr. James Hynes at the Cultwriter Institute for the Doomed, Damned and Deceased. He’s compiled a list of ten tales of horror to help you slip into a graveyard mood necessary for these autumn days.

New words added to my word list: feckless, crutching (verb), endgame, sylvan, erudite, hyperreal, baleful, eggheady, gizmo, guttering

Well here I am on a Thursday morning with clouds scowling across the sky, although I know the day is going to turn out sunny, writing from the “real” America—Portland, Oregon. I know that I’m often advising fellow wordslingers to hang out at salon.com to read something that I’ve found fascinating, so forgive my Plugola of this fabulous website. There are just too many good writers who contribute to ignore.

Today Stephen King's God trip is posted “On the 30th anniversary of "The Stand," the novelist confesses what haunts him about religion and today's politics.” It’s written by John Marks, a former 60 Minutes producer who is the author of Purple State of Mind and Reasons to Believe. He interviews King asking fascinating questions about our current political climate and religious beliefs.

Here’s how the article opens: In 1927, a little-known writer of horror stories named H.P. Lovecraft tried to put into words the secret of his diabolical craft. "The one test of the really weird is simply this," Lovecraft wrote in the introduction to "Supernatural Horror in Literature," "whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes or entities on the known universe's utmost rim."

Aren’t Lovecraft’s words gorgeous? And the article is terrific,mostly an interview with Stephen King pondering America’s fetish for apocalyptic worries and matters of faith.

And folks, just a reminder about keeping a word list. This means you’re culling, scavenging, plumbing the world for language that will fit your many uses and moods. My word list is a simple alphabetized Word document that I print out from time to time. The latest additions are (some cribbed from the King article): Soothsaying, blithely, hubris, trope, tomblike, ass sweat, squib, prescient, drubbed, suckled, dichotomy, kryptonite, juju, mingle, guttering, unbelief, cross-pollenization, demonize, bunkered, steeped

Lovely blue skies here today. Well folks Sarah Palin is the gift that keeps on giving. Just ask Tina Fey. Recent news was released that the Republican National Committee spent $150,000 on Palin’s wardrobe. Records also document several big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September. Like many people, I decry the mega expenses of modern-day politics, but that’s some serious cash.

Well, to be accurate the whole family was being outfitted including the First Dude. Now don’t you recall that the fiscally conservative Republicans criticized John Edward for his $400 haircut, Al Gore for changing his wardrobe colors, and Hillary and Bill for their expensive ‘dos? Apparently some of Palin’s expenses included hair and make up costs….I’ve been wondering about that hairpiece she wears ever since she appeared on the national scene. Apparently maverick rhymes with Saks Fifth Avenue ….But let’s look on the bright side: if she’s sent packing back to Wasilla (alias Methville) she’ll have the classiest wardrobe in the state. I predict she’ll run again for national office.

But back to the gift that keeps on giving. It appears that after Palin was drafted by McCain she changed the records of recent expenditures back in Alaska. It appears that she took her children on a number of excursions and designated their roles as “official” functions so thus their air flights, hotel rooms, and travel expenses were paid for by the taxpayers of Alaska. One trip included a 4-day trip with her daughter to New York where they spent more than $700 a night on hotel rooms.

Expect to hear about Jeremiah Wright in these closing days of the election along with more comments about how Obama and so many progressives are “anti-American” and socialists. Meanwhile, I wonder who is dressing Joe the Plumber these days?

Fog is blanketing the neighborhood as if ghosts were on the local decorating committee. Yesterday I had a bad case of the Mondays but one thing that buoyed me through the day was Colin Powell’s amazing interview and endorsement of Obama on Meet the Press. Now, I haven’t watched MTP much since Russert died, mostly because I’ve been disappointed with how Brokaw is running the show. In fact, as a journalist, I’m tired of Brokow’s bias and was shocked at how much it showed when he moderated the second presidential debate.

But the Powell interview was simply inspiring. He was making all the points that my friends and I have been talking about for the past months and his analysis was so cogent, eloquent, and plain that there was little room to refute his logic. I especially like how he demanded to know why being a Muslim is now a terrible slur in this country which was founded on religious tolerance. Now, Powell hasn’t been on my hit parade since he appeared before the United Nations and added his stamp of approval to our invasion of Iraq. But he answered that allegation in the interview and after the show with reporters, and I find it especially interesting that he’s one of the few Republican leaders in the country who is still respected. And I find it especially telling that we needed a Republican and man of conscience to stand up to repudiate the blatant bigotry towards Muslims.

Powell said: “I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said. Such things as 'Well you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.' Well the correct answer is 'He is not a Muslim, he's a Christian, he's always been a Christian.' But the really right answer is 'What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?' The answer is 'No. That's not America.' Is there something wrong with some 7-year old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she can be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion he's a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

"I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo-essay about troops who were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in you can see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards, Purple Heart, Bronze Star, showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian cross, it didn't have a Star of David. It had a crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Karim Rashad Sultan Khan. And he was an American, he was born in New Jersey, he was 14 at the time of 9/11 and he waited until he can go serve his counrty and he gave his life."

I believe this show would have made Tim Russert proud.

Of course that gasbag Rush Limbaugh is ranting on the air waves about how Powell’s endorsement was made because Obama is black. Let’s not forget that Limbaugh lost his sports announcer gig on ESPN when he made disparaging remarks about black quarterbacks and Donovan McNabb. Ugh.

October 20 was the poet Robert Pinsky’s birthday. He once said, "The longer I live, the more I see there's something about reciting rhythmical words aloud — it's almost biological — that comforts and enlivens human beings."

Sky is the color of soot and rain is in the forecast. Perfect day for writing and drinking tea if you’re so inclined. If you’re interested in receiving a newsletter from the National Book awards, hop over to their site at www.nationalbook.org.

This year's National Book Award finalists were announced last week and the ceremony will take place on November 19. Writer and actor Eric Bogosian will host this year's National Book Award Ceremony and Dinner. Among the fiction nominees are Peter Matthiessen, Rachel Kushner, and Marilynne Robinson. The Foundation to honor Maxine Hong Kingston with the 2008 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and Barney Rosset the 2008 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the Literary Community.

Matthiessen, who has been nominated four times for the award (winning in 1978 for The Snow Leopard), is nominated this year for Shadow Country, a new novel which consolidates his trilogy about legendary Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson. Robinson is nominated for Home, the successor and sequel to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead. Kushner receives the nomination for her debut novel, Telex From Cuba, a portrait of the American colonies in pre-Revolutionary Cuba and their collapse in the face of revolutionary change.

Pale skies this morning. Just a quick post. Joan Didion’s essay Election by Soundbite that will be published in this week’s New York Review of Books election issue is available today at salon. com. Obsessed by "lipstick on a pig," economic "free fall" and other "great stories," America has failed to see the real challenges it faces. My sentiments exactly.

And since the economy and the election have many of us feeling tense, check out Bookninja (http://wwwbookninja.com) for a contest of book cover designs that mostly spoof the contents of the story within. The Road cover is a particular play on images that are pretty much opposite of the story told……

Dawn hasn’t yet arrived so I’m sneaking in a bit of blog writing under a dark sky. I missed the beginning of last night’s debate because I was at a yoga class, but I couldn’t help but think that McCain looked and sounded deranged at times. Not to mention petulant, whiny, and angry. His sarcastic outbursts about Obama’s eloquence weren’t working, but he stuck with them. And his assertion that “I'm proud of the people who come to our rallies. I'm not going to stand for them saying that the people who come to our rallies are anything other than the most patriotic great citizens." is going to cause him to lose votes with minorities. Is he proud of the people who shout “terrorist” or “Kill him” about Obama or the man who recently brought a stuffed monkey to a rally dressed in an Obama t-shirt? I have a feeling that Americans just don’t have the stomach for this lemon-faced oddball and his vindictive hockey mom.

When I’m feeling worried about the international economy faltering or about how shenanigans might occur during the upcoming election I turn to other writers for solace. Garrison Keillor is one of my favorite people, although we’ve never met. The only time I was in the audience of his Prairie Home Companion show I was amazed that his monologues about Lake Woebegone are delivered without notes. He also wears red socks and the man I was dating at the time fell asleep during the show, another indicator of how mismatched we were. I love Keillor’s dry wit and sense of absurdity and basic decency. His weekly column in salon.com this week, Let the Leader Lead, begins with his musing about a sermon he heard this past week, talks about people he knows facing huge challenges and concludes with thoughts on the upcoming election. He writes, “Onward, America. We've all seen plenty of the worst -- the sly cruelty, the arrogant ignorance, the fascination with trivia, the cheats, the weaselish and piggish and the buzzardly -- but we can rise above it if we will only recognize a leader when one comes along and have the sense to let him lead.”

And speaking of salon.com, Anne Lamott’s contributions there have been infrequent in recent years, but lately she’s been writing about how we must keep the faith during these nerve-wracking, pre-election times. In her September 16th column where she compared Sarah Palin to a Southpark character and she suggested that people visit the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator as a cheerer upper. Since the Palins named their poor kids Track, Trig, Bristol, Willow, and Piper it answers the question of what your name would be if the Palins were your parents. My name, by the way would be Sport Grunt Palin.

On October 13 Lamott’s piece No time to cry wolf rain begins with “My pastor once said that you can trap bees on the bottom of a jar without a lid because they won’t look up. They walk around frantically bumping into glass while, one presumes, muttering.

I’ve been feeling like that lately, in these last weeks before the election. I feel trapped on the bottom of the TV jar, frantic, buzzing, bummed. It was largely due to having to see and hear Sarah Palin every time I turned on the TV or radio. Has there ever been, at least in the last 10 years, a more thoroughly repellent American?”
The essay goes on to describe a recent run-in with a wolf and (yes, I said wolf) and her essay concludes: “So what did I learn that day? I learned that fear is appropriate these days, much of the time. Don't let people tell you that you can't have faith and fear, as if you have to choose. The old saying goes, Faith is fear that has said its prayers. This is the best possible time in the history of the republic both to stay extremely afraid and also to keep the faith: If you feel too much of one, look around deep inside for the other. When you are really lost, take the next action that feels most right, and insight will follow. Justified fear is how we are going to win this election, and our faith in goodness, truth and the Constitution is why we must.

And, it almost goes without saying, wolves really don't belong in public parks, any more than they would in the office of the vice president of this nation.”
Meanwhile, happy writing to everyone and a special shout-out to Joe the Plumber. Sorry I cannot visit the blogosphere more often but my recovery from my car accident is taking me longer than anticipated and I’m only allowed to write and read 4 hours a day in 20-minute spurts. And remember that if you’re worrying about the world crumbling around you focus on what you can do today to feel safe and then make things a bit better for people around you. When my mood is especially low I say something nice to a stranger everywhere I go—it works like a charm.

Sky is scowling in the deepest shades of gray. Last night there was a freeze warning for some regions of the Northwest—including where my brother’s farm in eastern Washington is located. So the year is marching along and summer is now only a memory. Speaking of memories, yesterday was John Lennon’s birthday and I had one of those days when I wanted to trade in my body and brain. I don’t want to go into details because I cannot think of anything duller than someone’s categorizing their various symptoms on a blog, so before I start spiraling, let’s just say that I got through the day. At dusk I went out for a quick walk. The sky was the sort of sooty, gloomy color you’d associate with a Charles Dicken’s workhouse or Edgar Alan Poe’s skyline if he was walking through a graveyard and under the influence.

A few things I wanted to mention: There is an interview about me now posted at www.coolstuffrwriters.com.

Second, one of my favorite books was Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.(The film version with Christine Lahti was also terrific.) Anyway, in case you haven’t heard she has a new book out. The WSJ talks with Marilynne Robinson about her new novel Home and how it is not quite a sequel, yet manages to weave her searing insights about humanity into the story.

Third, apparently Donna Tartt has a new novel coming out with Little Brown. Trouble is, it won’t appear until 2012. Is it just me, or isn’t it a bit, uhm, premature to announce it now?

All around us the system is collapsing, GM stock has plummeted to under $5 a share. As our economy collapses my mind drifts back to the politics that brought this about. These days once again GOP operatives are trying to suppress the vote in battleground states. Everyone needs to check their voter registration. Yesterday the Alaska Supreme Court refused to halt Sarah Palin’s ethics probe at the request of Alaska Republicans. It turns out that the First Dude was involved for years in trying to get his brother-in-law fired as meanwhile Sarah refuses to answer a subpoena. Is it just me, but before this administration did anyone refuse a subpoena summons?

And this is hardly news but the hate speech, lies and slander that are now part of the daily gatherings of the McCain-Palin campaign whipping up their supporters to shout “kill him” and “terrorist” at their rallies really needs to be stopped. (Reminds me a bit of Reagan’s campaign—lest you forget how incredibly racist it was check out some of his early Southern campaign stops) But the point is, it appears that Palin is trying to incite violence. Is this what our political system has degenerated into? This also reminds me of the terrible events of 1968. That crazy old coot the cowardly McCain had a chance to confront Obama during their so-called debates. As I recall he couldn’t even look at Obama he was so incensed that a young upstart was smarter and more capable than him. As someone who has researched the habits of alpha males, this isn’t exactly on par with their behavior, even when they are perpetually pissed off. Speak the truth people, speak the truth. Before it’s too late.

Morning sky is a pale, smoky blue. I taught writing workshops at the Write on the Sound Conference last weekend in the lovely town of Edmonds, Washington and on Saturday afternoon attended the talk given by the keynote speaker, Samuel Green. He is a poet and his talk was entitled Singing the World into Being: The Discipline & Consolation of Poetry. He is the first Poet Laureate of Washington State, has taught poetry in Ireland, and lives with his wife on a remote island without electricity where they run the Brooding Heron Press. This press specializes in producing the poetry of the likes of Donald Hall, Gary Snyder, and Denise Levertov. He has other accolades, but it was clear that the man who has chosen a wardrobe of all black to make his life easier since he travels a lot as poet laureate, spouted poetry and the knowledge of poetry with such ease that I felt practically illiterate in his company.

Green began the talk by telling a story from his boyhood. When he and his brother were together in the back seat and started acting up his father would recite poetry to quiet them. This led to a lifetime interest in story poems and poetry of all types which broadened into trying his hand at writing them. When he fell in love at age 10 he wrote a poem to impress the girl of his dreams. He read that poem to the audience and when he finished, sitting near the front of the theater, I started clapping. To which he replied, “Where were you forty years ago?”

Throughout his talk he wove in the poems of his friends and favorites, ee cummings, Robert Service, Marilyn Hacker, Jane Kenyon, John O’Leary, and Hayden Carruth who died about a week ago. In Carruth’s New York Times obituary it was written: “He had a greater variety of poems than almost anybody,” said the poet Galway Kinnell, a longtime friend. “He was interested — superinterested — in everything and he could write about anything.” You can find poems by Carruth and other poets at www.poemhunter.com.

But mostly Green starting talking about how he turned to language to figure out his struggles, to allow the heart to speak. To quell the terror of not being able to connect. And as he talked, I remembered listening to NPR in the days following the 9/11 attacks. They ran a show that featured a number of poets reading their favorite poems, offering solace. I recalled how the voice of W.S. Merwin came over the airwaves from France and as I listened to him read, as Green said, I was willing to come out differently on the other side of the poem. And did. And for the first time since those terrible events I felt like we were all going to be able to go on.

After Green’s talk, drunk on poetry, I slipped into a Thai restaurant and ordered tea and a bowl of Tom Kha soup. Maybe it was the poetry, or the autumn afternoon, looking at the brooding sky, trees shivering in the autumn wind, and people bustling past bent against the wind, but it was probably the best bowl of soup I’ve ever eaten. The soup was creamy from coconut milk and had been simmered with complex flavors of lime, chili, and lemongrass.

Later I walked up to the Edmonds library and settled into a chair with a book of poems by W.S. Merwin and another by Ted Kooser, Winter Morning Walks. They were written as postcards to his friend Jim Harrison. In Kooser’s book he wrote poems, mostly haikus, about his walks as he was recovering from cancer and his poems are filled with acute awareness of his surroundings and all seem touched with the fragility of the human body. In the preface to his book, Kooser wrote: “In the autumn of 1998, during my recovery from surgery and radiation for cancer, I began taking a two-mile walk each morning. I’d been told by my radiation oncologist to stay out of the sun for a year because of skin sensitivity, so I exercised before dawn, hiking the isolated country roads near where I live, sometimes with my wife but most often alone.”

Each poem begins with a brief comment on the weather and conditions. If you’ve never read Kooser’s work, you’re missing his painter’s eye and deft hand with metaphor. The library is perched on a hill far above the harbor and was lined in windows. Between reading poems I watched the ever-changing sky as clouds in shades of funereal gray and cigarette smoke and fresh bruises scuttled northward as if heading beyond Canada.

Now that I’m home, I’m going to make my own version of Tom Kha and watch the autumn sky from here, and read more poetry. I’m going to be traveling down to Newport, Oregon to teach a class on Story People on October 25. For more information write me or check out the description at Craig’s List. Happy writing to all.

It’s Monday night and despite feeling so tired I wanted to topple onto my couch like a rag doll, I did the at-home sort of thing tonight—cooked kabobs for dinner, watered outside plants and flowerbeds, cleaned up the kitchen, watched the sky. Gorgeous clouds moved in at about 7 and the sky was pale, not grey, not white, and the clouds were blue—a sort of reverse canvas and after wind breezing through here earlier today, all became still and the sky looked so peaceful, it made you want to become a kite or find some means to float up to meet the mystical clouds.

I was home after yet another doctor’s appointment and running errands, and feeling awe that the dwindling days of September felt so much like July. A few times in the past few days of summer-like heat I was forced to check on my flower beds, and sure enough, there is that sort of creepy, mold-looking stuff overtaking some varieties, the roses are tired, the ferns not exactly sprightly. Summer is over, the evidence is everywhere despite our record high temperatures.

As the sky was turning to true dusk, I stepped out for a walk. I still was running conversations in my head as I walked along. I was wearing a sleeveless shirt and I was imagining a conversation with one of my doctors (perhaps doc number 3 or 4) because I was worried about what another doctor (perhaps number 5) had told me during our 3-hour appointment a few days ago. As they say, I was still ‘processing’ this appointment and his recommendations for medications and proclamations about the possible state of my head/brain health.

And to add to my personal drama, the previous evening I had driven to attend my book club meeting when my memory shorted out and I could not remember a major cross street although I had taught at a building located on this street for three years, following this same route, week after week, hundreds of times. By the time I reached the house where we were meeting I was rattled, and then proceeded to forget the names of every member of the cast in the book we’d read. (In my favor, I remembered what I liked and disliked about the book). So today I had a memory failure hangover because when both your long and short-term memory disappear in short order you don’t know if you should laugh or cry.

So I’m sauntering along tonight amid air so soft and so like Key West or Santa Barbara without the smell of ocean, and I cannot help myself, I start looking into windows. One of the reasons that this is my favorite time of year is because the farmer’s markets are like culinary jewelry stores and I get to look into my neighbor’s window at dusk as I stroll past. And the first window I peered into (from the sidewalk—I must explain because I fear my reputation is at stake) featured a mother walking her infant tucked to her chest, head lowered. She walked with the ancient cadence of condolence, patting him with that timeless gesture of comfort. And somewhere inside something started to shift and I counseled myself to stop talking to my doctors who weren’t around about my worries that I couldn’t do anything about in the moment and instead told myself ‘hush’. I repeated ‘hush’ as I stepped off the curb and then ahead of me in the gathering gloom a young couple turned the corner and preceded me. She was carrying a tote from L.L. Bean (I recognized the model) and an infant who looked like a newborn was strapped to the man’s chest. They murmured a bit and when they stepped into their yard, he paused and tucked her ahead of him in a gesture of such chivalry and tenderness that my heart almost broke.

I was walking faster by now, but I was slowing down inside my head. Next I passed a house that was dark except for a Tiffany-like lamp in the front window, bejeweled in deep greens and orange and leaf patterns. Next to the lamp was perched a Siamese who was peering out as if its owners would surely appear at any moment. And so the walk went—with one tableau after another until I arrived home unwound and softened and full of the small moments of domesticity and normalcy.

The sky is falling on Wall Street. Congress is afraid and the American people are pissed off. The world might change as we know it because China doesn’t want to keep loaning us a $billion a day to keep this country afloat. People are finally waking up to the scandalous and corrupt ways in which our economy has been managed. It just might be time for a sea change although my money is on the lobbyists who surely are putting in long hours these shaky days.

As for me, I’m grateful to be able to sit at my computer for awhile. On Saturday I was sitting in my living room and all of a sudden I felt a pop in my right ear and I couldn’t hear for a few minutes. Then my hearing loss faded and later I discovered that the vertigo that made me feel like a Saturday night drunk most of the time had eased some for a few days. If you’ve never had vertigo and you don’t drink, I don’t quite know how to explain it. Because you need to drink a LOT of alcohol until the room starts spinning to know what it feels like. I was trying to remember the last time I had the spins, and then to my embarrassment, realized it was only two years ago.

It happened after I hosted an end-of the summer party. My flowers were still blooming, the back yard was lovely, and I felt celebratory. So I rounded up about a dozen friends and I went out and bought a bunch of lobsters to boil. I picked dahlias and simmered a lovely basil-infused butter for dipping the lobster parts. Now, I had never cooked a lobster in my life before and somehow believed it was time I did. I had seen some photogenic lobster bake party in a Martha-Stewart like magazine and the recipes and lovely colors and beachy ease of it all appealed to me. Trouble is, when you buy a giant (as in fill up the trunk of your car) box of lobsters, it’s like you’re carting home your own personal zoo of mini-dinosaurs. They are frighteningly alive and prehistoric looking. I was freaked. Luckily, I talked one of my dear friends into boiling the beastly things for me while I attended to my various salads, bread, corn on the cob, deserts and keeping the champagne flowing and generally hiding out from killing our main course.

It was the sort of party where the sunset goes on for a long time and a lot of wine/champagne is ingested. At one point in the party I ventured out to stop the heated political discussion in which the only Republican and Viet Nam War vet in attendance was told to f—himself. At least one guest was staggering even after all my food and another guest supposed that perhaps Hitler wasn’t evil after all. A series of dramas were breaking out all over and I developed a tic in my right eye. (come to think of it, it has returned in the past few days) When finally everyone had gone home and I was singing along to my CD player and cleaning up a surprising mess, I consoled myself by finishing off the dregs of several bottles of wine. Which was when vertigo set in and I toddled off to bed.

Previous to that had been after a prolonged a Tilt-o-Whirl ride at the Clark County fair in about 1996 but that’s a long story and the ride operator was a flirt and sadist. Just trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to experience vertigo when you’re trying to buy lettuce or a pair of shoes or walk across a parking lot. I wish everyone sturdy steps or an otherwise firm ballast as you write and go about your days. I hope your pension and 401Ks are safe. Now, as for your dreams, I’m not sure firmness can be wished for, but happy writing anyway.

Sky is drizzling rain and the neighborhood is still and quiet except for geese honking past. Today is Stephen King’s birthday and one of my favorite quotes from the maestro is “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” When I was a girl the Milwaukee Journal had a section called the Green Sheet. It was a four page section printed on pale green paper and contained comic strips, a crossword puzzle, games, columns, and quirky news stories. It was a beloved section of the paper discontinued in the 1990s when the paper merged with the Sentinel. Like many kids, I grew up learning how to read from the Green Sheet. That section of the paper featured a long-forgotten comic strip called Brother Jupiter. He was a chubby little friar with a fringe of hair and of course, always wore a clerical robe. For some reason I remembered him last night for the first time in years, possibly decades. I’m not sure why Juniper came to mind, but my grandmother, dead many years was fond of the comic strip and I’ve been thinking about her lately.

I spent most of the day in bed yesterday resting and then went to two parties after cutting large bouquets of multi-hued dahlias. The first was my neighbors who were celebrating an anniversary and have turned their yard nestled under two giant firs into a fairyland of ponds and cozy seating areas, archways, paths twisting throughout made from pottery mosaics, and lanterns twinkling. Another guest told a story about how she met the hostess years ago, then lost track of her. Then she started dreaming about her night after night and resumed their friendship. We talked about how dreams are threaded from the past and the present meeting, how fun it is to try and dissect their origins and meaning.

The second was a 60th birthday party and people dressed in 60s garb and many had come to celebrate long and hard. The hostess had added lava lamps, strings of beads and Janis Joplin posters for ambiance and there were so many people and movement, that I needed to step outdoors several times to rest my brain from all the stimulation. And sometimes when people were talking to me it felt like a movie scene where the camera makes everything look close up and distorted. My head is a band of pain this morning, but then I remember a particularly silly costume from the night before and it’s worth it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about memory lately because mine has been affected by my car accident. My short and long-term memory are still shockingly unreliable and I’m in a new county here. In this country, I’m not a complete stranger, since my memory has been far from perfect in recent years, but at times if feels like I’ve stepped into a particularly psychedelic Bergman movie with a constantly shifting landscape. These days I need to make lists about everything, I need to google names and words that were once easily recalled, most projects I undertake take me twice or three times as long as they once did, and I need to rest my injured brain a lot. I don’t shop much because the bright lights and movement in stores is sending me into bouts of vertigo so dizzying that my legs become unreliable putty beneath me. So life feels like an acid-laced carnival ride at times and if you notice that I’m not in the blogosphere much these days it’s because I’m lying in the dark blocking out stimulation. And thinking that a brain injury is fascinating, but not to experience firsthand.

Since I don’t have a stock portfolio, from a distance I’ve been watching the stock market tank, the plans for a trillion-dollar bailout for financial institutions that haven’t been regulated in decades taking shape, and our country’s economy pretty much going down the tubes. It’s clear we’re in a huge recession and an economic meltdown. Can we weather this storm and who will pay the price for all this greed and madness? You might want to revisit the insanity of Reaganomics and the 1999 vote in the Senate about deregulation. Of course there’s lot of blame to go around. Freddy, Fanny, AIG, Bear Sterns all gone or on life support. Who, what is next? We’ve lost 600,000 jobs this year in the U.S. And then the residents of Texas who are still suffering from the ravages of Ike need ice and electricity and FEMA still isn’t working. Meanwhile, rescuers are pulling bodies from the charred ruins of the bombsite in Pakistan and suicides are up among our troops. My mind is spinning, but wait, I have vertigo so that’s not an apt metaphor.

Enough. Here is a tip on writing: You Can’t Write about People You don’t Know When you write fiction you create your major players by making choices about their physical appearance, flaws, quirks, habits, back story, outlook on life, values, emotional needs, as well as their friends or supportive cast members and enemies. With your major characters you’ll want to know what pushes their buttons, how they act when intoxicated, how far they’ll go to get what they want, and what passions, desires, and emotional needs drive them.

Now, not everything you know about your main characters will end up in the pages of your manuscript. You’ll always know more about your characters than you can use. You create complex characters and then make choices about which aspects of them should be exposed. You also hold back at times, realizing that readers can fill in the blanks with their imagination. Some things about your character you’ll state explicitly, some you’ll hint at, some will lie in the subtext of conversations and other parts of the story.
To get started in shaping main characters here are questions that you’ll want to answer:
What was the character’s home life like in childhood?
Was he shaped by any traumatic events or losses?
What is his or her chief flaw? Can it be showcased in the story? Transformed?
What does he do on his day off—hang out at comic book stores, wax his sport car, or sleep till noon?
What does his home or apartment reveal about him? Consider here his collections, furnishings, books and music. What do his housekeeping habits reveal?
How would his best friend describe him?
How would his mother describe him?
What does his style of dress reveal?
Does he take care of himself as in exercising, taking vitamins, eating well?
What is his emotional range—how does he act when angry, sad, euphoric?
How far will he go to get what he wants?
What is in the refrigerator, kitchen junk drawer and car’s glove compartment?
How does your character react under pressure, especially physical danger?

Think about it—you know what’s in your mother’s refrigerator (or at least have a rough sense of her food preferences, condiments, and the like) just as you’re familiar with your best friend’s car and your brother’s temper when opposed. We have intimate knowledge of some people in our lives and this knowledge is used as context in all our dealings with them. Likewise, in fiction, readers need intimate knowledge of the main players and use this knowledge as context as the story unfolds.

I wish every writer out there fine writing and rainbows of inspiration and that you keep laughing at yourself. I’ve found that even a brain injury is funny. Keep writing, keep dreaming and happy autumn to all. Guest bloggers will win a place in paradise.

Overcast sky this morning. I tried earlier to post a blog but keep getting an html error message. So because I cannot figure it out, I wanted to post this interesting quote from Seven Days: A Diary by David Grossman published in the October issue of The Sun. Grossman lives in a suburb of Jerusalem and wrote his diary in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. (By the way, you might want to check out this issue of The Sun, because it has one of the most beautiful cover photograph of all time.)

He writes: “Several months have gone by since I finished my last book, and I felt that not writing was having a bad effect on me. When I’m not writing, I have a feeling that I don’t really understand anything; that everything that happens to me, all events and statements and encounters, exist only side by side, without any real contact between them. But the minute I begin writing a new story, everything suddenly becomes intertwined into a single cord: every event feeds into and imbues all other events with life. Every sight I see, every person I meet is a clue that’s been sent to me, waiting for me to decipher.”

So the morning sky is tinged with pink and full of promise—of heat that is. I know we’re much better off here in Portland than all those pitiful folks in the path of Hurricane Ike, so I’ll try not to complain that the temperatures are going to top 90 today when people are still missing from the hurricane. The financial markets aren’t open yet, but there is more news that the banking industry is in big trouble. Merrill Lynch has found a buyer, but Nieman Brothers has not and is filing for bankruptcy. Hang on to your butts….

Meanwhile, we lost a great writer when David Foster Wallace hanged himself on September 12. He was 46 and a great voice was silenced. I’ve never read his fiction, although Infinite Jest has long been on my radar screen, but at more than 1,000 pages I haven’t dug into to it yet. But his nonfiction was darkly witty, innovative, accurate, and deep. You might want to read his essay McCain's Promise that was recently republished. I’m so sorry for his wife, family, friends, and students.

Yesterday afternoon I returned from a trip to Central Oregon, weaving through mountains and canyons and sage and past pastures of grazing horses and cattle. I stayed in a small town oozing with charm and decided I’d move to a small town in a heartbeat if there was a way to make a living and there were enough progressives around. However, I returned home with too many symptoms and problems from my travels. So because of my continued saga of body and brain injuries, and on the advice of one of my doctors, I’ve canceled my gigs for the next two weekends. My apologies to anyone planning on attending—the spirit is willing, the flesh is falling apart. Enough about my dilapidated self (remember: don’t answer your cell phone when you’re driving, you never know who you might crash into). Also, I’m still looking for guest bloggers.

Here’s a tip on writing: Effective fiction is nuanced and layered. It also, in a sense, haunts the reader with its subtle refrains like a powerful melody. So how is this accomplished without creating a muddled mess or a story as naked as a newborn hatchling?Let’s focus on details, the mainstay of fiction that resonates. Details stir a reader’s senses and haunt with their clarity. Yet details should never be catalogued or listed. Instead, they need to appear natural, enhancing the story in some way. If the details aren’t adding to the story, then leave them out.

Remember, too, that description is static, another reason to insert it sparingly. If you constantly stop your story to describe sunsets, seashores, interiors, hairstyles, and heartbeats, your story will likely lose its momentum. Readers are interested in the forward motion of the story and their eyes veer to dialogue and other places where action and movement is on the page.
A solution is to put description in motion or slip it in through a character’s viewpoint. Thus, insert details via a character’s thoughts, amid action scenes, in the middle of dialogue, while characters are moving.

Old School, a novel by Tobias Wolff, is told with a kind of aching subtlety. Dialogue is spare, descriptions pared down to essentials, but still the story manages to soar, to offer moments when the reader pauses and lingers over words and scenes because they contain so much yet seem to be written with so little. It is a story of a boy who is an outsider, attending a small New England prep school on a scholarship in the early 1960s. In a school filled with “book drunk boys,” there are a number of contests and honors centered on writing and literature. These prizes bring out the best and worst in the boys and eventually result in disgrace for the narrator.

Here is a brief passage right before his downfall, the story’s major reversal:
I was glad for the day of grace I’d been given. After my last class that afternoon I went AWOL across the river and mucked through freshly ploughed fields to the tallest of the neighboring hills, Mount Winston as we called it. …

I paced the hilltop, exhausted but too nervous to sit. In my classes the blood-roar in my head had rendered me nearly deaf. Most of this was explosive relief and exhilaration, yet with a thumping underpulse of dread. It was one thing to confide your hidden life to a piece of paper in an empty room, quite another to have it broadcast.

A warm wind blew across the hilltop, and with it the faint cries of boys chasing balls. The school lawns and fields were a rich, unreal green against the muddy brown expanse of surrounding farmland. Between the wooded banks of the river two shells raced upstream, oars flashing. The chapel with its tall crenellated bell tower and streaming pennant looked like an engraving in a child’s book. From this height it was possible to see into the dream that produced the school, not mere English-envy but the yearning for a chivalric world apart from the din of scandal and cheap dispute, the hustles and schemes of modernity itself. As I recognized this dream I also sensed its futility, but so what? I loved my school no less for begging gallantly unequal to our appetites—more, if anything. With still a month to graduation I was already damp with nostalgia.
I stretched out on a slab of rock. The sun in my face and radiant warmth on my back lulled me to sleep. Then the wind cooled and I woke with a wolfish hunger and started back.

This passage, a transition leading to the action that follows, creates a moment of significance because it reveals his love for the school; it shows us the school from a fresh perspective, a hillside; it reveals the stakes involved; it foreshadows what is to come; and yet lulls the reader with its pastoral mood so that the events that follow are more disturbing. And while it is a fairly long descriptive passage, it is not an inert blob. One technique that keeps this passage from being static is the active verbs scattered throughout: mucked, paced, blew, chasing, raced, flashing, yearning, sensed, loved, begging, stretched, lulled, cooled, and started.

Wolf’s example is a good reminder to add life to descriptions by writing in the active voice whenever possible. For example, here is the passive version: There were hundreds of spectators on the lawn. The active voice can be written: Hundreds of spectators dotted the lawn. An easy tip is to avoid using There is, There was, There are, or It was to begin your sentences because this construction guarantees these sentences will be passive.

Sky is pale, pale blue and temperatures should be in the 80s here today. Later I’m heading out later today for Oregon’s high desert. I’ll be talking about characters and signing books at Paulina Springs Books in Sisters tonight and tomorrow at their Redmond store. I know I mention salon.com a lot here—it’s because some of my favorite writers are regular contributors. The second Wednesday of every month Camille Paglia writes a column. Paglia, who calls herself a “dissident feminist” is
always articulate, provocative, and witty. And yikes, what a vocabulary! Her latest column on 9/10/08 is called Fresh Blood for the Vampire and warns progressives not to sound shrill or hyperbolic in their denouncements of Sarah Palin. Good advice since I’m feeling pretty darn shrill these days……

In the same issue Cintra Wilson has written Pissed About Palin and (McCain’s running mate is a Christian Stepford wife in a sexy librarian costume. Women, it’s time to get furious.) She writes: “She is dangerous. She is not just pro-life, she's anti-life. She is the suppression of human feeling and instinct. She is a slave to the compromises dictated by her own desire for power and control. Sarah Palin is untethered from her own needs and those of her family, which is in crisis, with a pregnant daughter, a son on the way to Iraq and a special-needs infant.

She should, however, be a galvanizing point for women everywhere. Not to support her candidacy but to rebel against the Republican Party and take back the respect and equality so hard-earned by the women's liberation movement in the 1970s.” And the debate continues.

Also, this was emailed to me so I wanted to pass it along for people in the Northwest: Just a reminder, Dan Poynter, who is widely known as the guru of Independent Publishing, is coming to Portland hosted by NW Association of Book Publishers and National Speakers Association - Oregon.
I've seen him before and he is really down to earth about the publishing business -- the next step for authors, of course, whether by traditional publishing or the increasingly popular independent publishing.

Here are the bare essentials:
Dan Poynter
Sponsored by Northwest Assn. of Book Publishers and the Oregon Chapter of
National Speaker's Association.
October 1, 6-9 PM
Ambridge Event Center
300 NE Multnomah (near the Lloyd Center) Portland
$35 per person includes Dan, appetizers and no-host bar
To reserve: http://www.nsaoregon.net/calendar.html - scroll down to the
event - space is limited
For more information: http://nwabp.org/pages/poynter.html

Greetings to readers of Jessica’s blog from guest blogger, Libby Jacobs. I met Jessica at a writers’ conference two years ago, and have been an eager reader of her newsletter since then. Although I had never “blogged,” I was intrigued by her request for guest writers. The topic, three books that influenced me, sounded almost too easy until I started thinking about favorite books, important books, books whose characters, plots, and emotional impact have stayed with me for decades. Limiting the discussion to three seemed overwhelming, so I restricted the choices to books that influenced me as a writer.
Using my imaginative prerogative as a writer, I’ll pretend that I can’t count to three, and ever-so-briefly mention the Nancy Drew books that seem to be part of the childhood of most women who grow up to be writers. The books taught me that a secret, a mystery, must be hidden in the heart of any good story regardless of genre.
The first book I’d like to mention is Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates, the grim story of Quentin, a sexual predator and serial killer. While Oates frequently explores the dark side of human nature, this work is a particularly horrifying study of a deviant criminal. Not content to examine the mind of the killer from the outside, she takes the bold step of putting herself in Quentin’s mind and engaging the reader through the first person device of a diary. Lines like “My whole body is a numb tongue” establish a chilling authenticity.
Oates backs away from no gruesome detail of the serial killer’s search for a handsome, compliant slave, his “zombie.” Especially unsettling is her suggestion that Quentin appears ordinary, and could be someone the reader knows and comes into contact with every day.
Not an easy read, this novel taught me a valuable lesson: If you can think it, if it is part of your story, write it without apology. “Wolf Note,” the first story in my collection of the same name, deals with a young female cellist who has an incestuous relationship with her brother. The last story is a monologue by a disturbed adolescent patient in a mental ward. Without the courageous example of Joyce Carol Oates in Zombie, I might have pulled back in these stories or dropped them from the collection. Zombie kept me honest.
When working on my novel about a concert pianist who leaves music, I read Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. In an unnamed South American country, Roxane Coss, renowned American soprano, has presented a recital for a group of international guests gathered in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a Japanese businessman. At the end of the evening, armed terrorists take the group hostage. Over the four-month siege, captors and captives become allies, friends, and lovers. I studied the book to learn how she had so skillfully interwoven love stories and international intrigue. Because she wrote so sensitively and knowledgably about opera, and music in general, I was surprised to learn that she had not been an opera aficionado before writing Bel Canto, and I examined her language for clues to how she created lines so lyrical that they supported the musical theme like breath supports a singer’s voice. And talk about a stunning first line in a novel, Bel Canto’s “When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her” is magnificent.
Each time I approach Bel Canto as a textbook to illuminate some issue in my writing, I find myself lost in the beauty of the story. Perhaps that is the most important lesson we can learn from a novel: we are storytellers above all.
I’m cheating a bit on the third book because it’s neither published nor a single volume. I recently found and have begun rereading my mother’s poetry notebooks, yellowed lined pages spiral-bound in brown cardboard covers. She was young when she died forty years ago, but if I listen closely as I read the poems she wrote and collected, I can almost hear a whisper of her voice.
She was a nurse who volunteered to serve in the Army Air Corps during WWII. Her Irish father loved poetry, and she inherited his passion for words. In the notebooks she pasted poems cut from magazines, poems copied in fading blue pen from books, and verse she had written. Occasionally a poem appears in a different handwriting, an addition by a poetry-loving friend, perhaps written in a hospital ward overseas.
I remember my mother reciting poetry to my sister and me before bedtime. It was not always good poetry; one of my favorites, probably because of the tragic narrative, was “Lasca” about a young woman, “wild as the breezes that blow,” who sacrifices her life to save her lover in a Texas cattle stampede. Not your typical bedtime story for a five or six year old, but a loving introduction to the passionate, rhythmic, musical language of poetry. The memories remind me that before I was a writer, I was a reader; and before I was a reader, I was a listener, absorbing words spoken with an Irish passion for language.
On the cover of her notebooks she wrote: “I am a miser of rhyme and verse.” But “miser” suggests a selfish quality, and if long ago she gathered the poems for her own pleasure, she also saved them – for my sister and me, for my daughter, and for my granddaughter who is just learning to read.

Keep writing, and, if you like, visit my website at www.libbyjacobs.com.

"Bullies, Bastards and Bitches...with sub-plots" re: the fiction of T.C. Boyle (guest entry by W. Dale Sturdavant
There's a light that fills you up when you're writing; there's a magic...It's a miracle and it's a rush...It's so utterly thrilling to me, it's all I want to do...T. Caraghessan Boyle

Apologies to Jessica for borrowing the title of her newest book, but Boyle creates some of the most loathsome bad guys in the fictional universe. These are sinister fellows; sociopaths with hearts of stone, brains blazing with evil. Boyle fleshes out their nefarious traits in sub-plots. The bullies creep and slither through the pages, tormenting, raping, pillaging. Boyle's abused protagonists, meanwhile, push ahead, vulnerable, but resilient, fighting back with wit, courage and spunk. Sometimes they even win. Regardless of the outcome, the battles always entertain.
Boyle opens his most recent novel, Talk, Talk (2006), with a hearing-impaired young woman panicked at discovering an identity thief has turned her life upside down: checking and savings accounts drained, credit cards run up to their limits, herself perceived as villain by a legal system not yet adapted to computer crime. Her plight unfolds in increments, each new twist compounding her disaster. She could crumple, reach for the Valium, wallow in victim hood; but Boyle makes her a fighter, a pit bull on two legs and steroids.
We turn the page and enter an underworld inhabited by our reprehensible villain. He's a narcissistic, ex-con, con man with expensive tastes--and a "material girl" fiance (the "bitch" of Jessica's pantheon of antagonists)who pesters him with ever more lavish demands. Keeping his woman plush with goodies, his own body be-jeweled like a pimp's, our thief cruises from coast to coast in his new Cadillac (leased with another man's credit), feeling like a Man, smugly superior to the working fools who unwittingly fill his coffers. Providing for his "family" (fiance has a young son) becomes the bastard's rationale for increasingly grandiose schemes to plunder other people's money. He partner's up with an old prison buddy and learns to use black-market software. With a little research and a few clicks of the mouse, he upgrades his victims pool and garnishes their wealth in larger and larger chunks.
Informed with extensive research, a quality evident in all his novels, Boyle leads us through the shady world of financial terrorism. Tension builds between plot and sub-plot and sparks begin to fly. Our implacable heroine, having lost her teaching job at a school for the deaf, quickly realizes the system isn't on her side. She sets out to track down the thief who's made such a shambles of her life.
Boyle tosses a cascade of obstacles into the paths of both heroine and villain. Plot and sub-plot twist, churn, bump against each other and finally intersect.
"Talk, Talk" ( a phrase the hearing impaired use to describe what the rest of us do)shook me up, left me feeling almost vulnerable, a mere mouse click from financial ruin. And not nearly as clever and courageous as the heroine. I loved the suspense, the writing, the realistic foray into a mind frozen in cold-blooded greed. So did Universal Pictures, which purchased the rights to Talk, Talk and is currently producing a film version.

Partly cloudy skies and the weather is supposed to be drying up and warming up this week. The good news is that Hurricane Gustav has been downgraded to a Category 2 storm and the main brunt will miss New Orleans, although there will still be 100 mph winds in the city. I think we’re all holding our breaths about whether the levees will hold….And why haven’t they been fixed? Because all our money is going into Iraq which has a huge surplus of cash? I finished reading Lin Enger’s Undiscovered Country yesterday—he’s the brother of Leif Enger of Peace Like a River. That family has words in their veins….it’s a satisfying read and I think I’m going to search out the mystery series that they penned together.

Anyway, yesterday I was writing my column for my September newsletter, and wanted to throw out a few general writing tips. Open scenes with a swoosh. Hop into the action or important information without prelude. Start in the midst of action whenever possible. Don’t set up every scene, or follow characters around endlessly as they head toward the scene. Jump in and the reader will follow.

Find fresh images. In The Witchfinder by Loren D. Estleman the image isn’t complex but still gives goosebumps: “In a little while the streetlights would blink on and then the headlamps, a set at a time like bats awakening, and the city would turn itself darkside out like a reversible jacket, shaking out the creatures that breathed and bred it is folds.

Avoid overpopulation. I was talking with a writer I recently met about his early draft of his novel and while he had a terrific idea for a novel, he needed to nail down the smaller techniques that make a novel complete. I noticed he was especially having problems with scenes that were overpopulated. If you find you’ll need a group scene, be sure to give the reader a wide angle shot to establish the scene (read the opening of chapter 3 of The Great Gatsby to note how Fitzgerald introduces Gatsby’s parties).

Emphasis is helped by honing your scenes to the most important players. Beginning writers tend to overpopulate stories and scenes. And while it’s true that sometimes we need a crowd scene when your character attends a party, a ceremony, or sporting event, but still the action always hones in on a few key players. Important characters get lost in a mob scene. You also might be able to combine two or three supporting characters into one.

Trade in bland verbs—look, see, get, put, got, run, ran, walked, turned, crossed, leave, left, go, gone, have, had—for vibrant ones. But beware of using florid verbs (the car grumbled to a stop)—powerhouse verbs are important but you can’t hire muscle for each sentence.

When in doubt, use restraint.

Focus on beginnings and endings. Researchers have shown that the human brain pays more attention to beginnings and endings, and that people also remember them best. So, as a writer, you want to load your most potent ideas and vivid words at the beginning and ending of sentences, paragraphs, scenes and chapters.

One tip-off that there is not enough action in your story is when your protagonist spends a lot of time alone in scenes. Unless you’re a highly skilled writer, the proportion of the time your protagonist spends alone should be small, perhaps 5 percent of the story. Now, there are exceptions, but generally you want other characters on stage with him to mix it up. Beware of especially spending too much time alone with the character reflecting on events that have already happened or traveling to and from scene locales. (Enger did a good job of making these moments push the dramatic in Undiscovered Country.)

Another tip-off to not enough action is the amount of words spent on introspection. If you’re often inside your character’s head, there typically will not be enough action or outer conflict. While of course there are exceptions, character thoughts are more like the icing on the chocolate cake, not the meal.

Don’t overdescribe. Avoid catalaogues, lists and endless weather reports. Many things in fiction are never written, they’re implied, empowering the reader to slip in his own imagining.

Don’t overpower the reader in every sentence—choose when to emphasize, when to back off. Use sentence fragments for emphasis. When it works for the type of book you’re writing, create sentence structures that mimic natural speech patterns, that is conversational with a strong mix of short, simple sentences.
Be concrete and specific, never vague.

Generally it’s okay if your opening scenes and chapters are longer than later chapters as you need to establish the world of the story.

Not every scene will be followed by a sequel followed by another scene. Sequels occur as a means of pacing and deepening characterization. The pattern you develop for scene-sequel will depend on the needs of the overall structure and level of drama in the scenes. You can slip a flashback into a sequel because if it was inserted into the scene, it would dilute the drama. The amount of sequel contained in a plot depends on the genre. Romance novels have more sequels than action novels because they are focused intensely on the characters’ emotional experiences, while action plots are woven tightly around scenes, not characters reacting to the action.

Guest bloggers still needed—contact me. Happy writing to all, Jessica

Marine clouds still scattered across the dawn sky. I ran across this bit of advice from Sandra Brown I wanted to pass along because I agree with it so wholeheartedly: “The worst piece of advice I was ever given was to write about what I know. I took stock of what I knew and, from a creative standpoint, none of it was very stimulating. Nor did it have much potential for being engaging and entertaining to a reading audience. I have no personal knowledge of, or experience with, paramilitary hate groups, or heart transplantation, or escapees from a maximum security prisons, or what it’s like to be profoundly deaf. But I’ve written about all these topics, and the books became bestsellers.
I figure that if something interests me, there’s a reasonably good chance that it’s going to interest the reader, too. As I approach the keyboard each day, I remind myself to have a good time—as good a time as one can have doing the hardest work there is.”

Soot-colored skies and it looks like rain is coming. Yesterday after a particularly hellish chiropractic session when my doc was digging into places in my neck until I was sure I would throw up all over his office although I only vomit when pregnant, I managed to quell my nausea long enough to visit the post office and send off copies of Writing Out the Storm (out of print) to amazon. It’s been a tough last few days and I’m especially having problems with blurred vision and eye strain and doing much of anything that is productive…..In fact, a bit of despair and self pity had set in and this had been increased by a rude email from a writer whose opening chapters I’d critiqued, a request from a writer to review and critique her writing as a favor (no favors in me at the moment although I often feel a bit guilty for saying no) a crappy review of my Bullies, Bastards & Bitches book at amazon.com by someone who missed the point entirely of what I’m trying to say, and having difficulty walking and doing anything without huge amounts of pain. So a pity party was in progress, with wild, sad saxophone notes playing in my head and feelings like a flood had just swept me downriver. Make that the muddy Mississippi or one crawling with alligators. So to my surprise whilst at the post office I found a large box addressed to me. It was from my students and fellow writers—a writing group in Olympia. And it contained Godiva chocolates in one of those beguiling gold boxes that demand to be opened. So after Hillary made nice at the Convention I nibbled a few. And felt so much better as chocolate melted on my tongue and slipped into my soul and the knowledge that my peeps –wherever they may be--care about me and my world. Gratitude feels so much better than self pity. Here are two sites you might want to visit: poetrydaily.org.and blackbird.vcu.edu Keep writing…..