As we approached Billie Holiday’s 100th birthday earlier this month (April 7, 1915 in Baltimore, MD), numerous musicians, performers, and jazz experts offered opinions about what makes Lady Day so indelible. Some mentioned her unique voice. Many focused on the emotional weight of her songs, remarking how well she translated her own misery and hardship into bluesy jazz. Others shorthanded it, saying…
Category: on prose writing
Quality Alert? Writers and The Internet
A writer must consider quality content above all else: This is a great statement when you first glance at it. It is one of these “think positive” type of messages we all love to hear or read about. I agree with the statement, in the surface style it is given, but I don’t agree writers must…
Six Tips For Writing That First Novel
Writing novels when you have experience is daunting. Writing a first novel, then, can seem like an impossible task, especially when you have nothing going for you except desire and a head full of ideas. I recently commented on a book by someone who asked for a review through my Review Exchange offer. I could tell…
![Drawing by Frank Blackwell Mayer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://www.thewoventalepress.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Traders_cabin_by_Mayer.gif)
Nathaniel Smith: Black Pioneer of the Mendocino Coast
People are often surprised to learn that an African American was one of the first non-indiginious settlers on the Mendocino Coast. While details are often contested, it’s widely agreed that Nathaniel Smith settled on a coastal bluff roughly six miles south of the Navarro River and just north of present day Elk sometime between 1851 and 1854. Other than a…
Why I'll Likely Self-Publish My Novel
I’ve been struggling to find a literary agent for one of my two fiction novels for more than a year now. I’ve pitched the story at conferences and via email, and received a steady trickle of rejections. Mostly formulaic responses, some nicer than others, one or two with encouraging words, but all the same rejection…
Mistakes to Avoid in Short Story Writing
As the fiction editor for Eclectica Magazine, it’s been both a privilege and pleasure to read story submissions. Finding the handful of pieces that take my breath away is what it’s all about. The good ones shine through, those that are brilliant positively sparkle. That said, it’s too bad that so many stories that come my…
What Genre Do I Write?
So what genre would you assign to this book? Oh, I know! It has to be about an exterminator named Ki’shto’ba who labors at destroying termite colonies by abducting their Queens! Right?! What genre is this? Hmm … hard to tell from the cover. In fact, I call it speculative literary science fiction, future history, psychological…
The Nine Commandments of Indie Writing
As a published Indie Writer, I attest to the hard work it takes to complete a manuscript. Family and friends’ “this is good” critiques do not good writers make, neither does moaning about the absence of the muse, or other responsibilities that may take writers away from writing. The successful Indie Writer: sets and respects stated/written goals…
A Writing Retreat: More Than A Creative Writing Tune-Up
A few weeks ago, I had the equivalent of a writer’s meltdown until I made two conclusions, one of which involved meeting a certain person by the name Lise Weil. (You can read about it here). After talking to her and learning about the writing retreat that she runs a few times a year, I decided…
Six Rules of Grammar Fiction Writers Can Challenge
By Tamsin de la Harpe 1. Sentence Fragments. Look, fiction writers use sentence fragments. Most of you should know this by now, because you read books and if they’re halfway decent books you’ll see sentence fragments. Like this. Assuming, however, that your high school English teacher broke this habit out of you, along with the…
Old Photographs and Memoir
By Lee Martin of http://leemartinauthor.com I remember on New Year’s Eve, when I was a boy, my father’s side of the family would gather for a supper of oyster soup and games of cards—usually either Pitch or Rook. This was in a day when we didn’t have cell phones that took pictures, when we didn’t…
Organizing the Memoir
By Lee Martin of http://leemartinauthor.com Were you feeling a little disorganized around the holidays? Imagine the way writers of memoirs must feel when faced with the task of giving shape and structure to the experiences that they’re trying to render on the page. I’ve had a request to talk about such things, so here goes. When writing…