Diane Duane shows us all how not to behave in the presence of a Plot Bunny here. Heed the warning! Take heed!

The good folk of Making Light are having fun with a meme:He only uses prepositions when it is entirely necessary. He doesn’t misplace commas: he helps commas go into the Punctuation Protection Program. The characters in his novels send him fan letters. ... He once wrote a story that consisted of a single sentence which was serialized in three ( Read more... )

James MacDonald got it started over at Making Light:You got problems with your writing
She said to me
The answer’s easy if you
Put your B in C
I’ll show you how to move along
When you find you’re up a tree
There must be fifty ways
To plot your novel.
But I must say my favorite comes from Stephen Frug in the comments:A man throws down his pencil ( Read more... )

Pale in the gray dawn,
a frozen puddle preserves
night's scattered snowflakes.

Thanks for the gift, evil_little_dog! Om nom nom ...Until the first flake
Melts on the tongue, can we say
It's truly winter?

My local goddaughter's younger sister, N, has the makings of a writer.

I was checking her homework last night and she handed me a set of comma usage exercises. (Serial comma usage, ha! Take that, Associated Press!) She was to take several short descriptive sentences and combine them into one long descriptive sentence; thusThe train was noisy ( Read more... )

From a lecture by T.S. Eliot on John Milton, read 26 March 1947:I believe that the scholar and the practitioner in the field of literary criticism should supplement each other's work. The criticism of the practitioner will be all the better, certainly, if he is not wholly destitute of scholarship; and the criticism of the scholar will be all the ( Read more... )

More kerfuffle has erupted over a leaked draft of Stephenie Meyer's next planned novel in the Twilight series. Observers are divided over the author's decision to shelve the project, but until Nora Roberts weighs in, I think Diane Duane has the best analysis of the situation:The line that brought me up short was this one:

With writing, the way ( Read more... )

This one's for you, nateprentice, and your lovely wife:Ah! Alone at last,
Two forms make one silhouette,
Limned by candles' light.Remember to blow them out
Before wax drips on the cake.

Many happy returns(es) of the day(s)!

Pushing a book truck
Across the worn, pilled carpet,
I pass a window:Silently thronging the air,
Snowflakes drift earthward. Surprise!
Inspired by yesterday's weather, composed primarily on the edge of sleep last night, and -- mirabile dictu! -- not forgotten by dawn, this poem does not explain why I then dreamed about commuting barefoot to work ( Read more... )