Skip to main content

A Different Way to Write Book Club Questions

I am nearing the end of my Beta reader feedback on In the Name of Mississippi. Thus, in complete blind faith that I will find an agent for this manuscript and, unlike my last three agents, they will sell this novel about a groundbreaking civil rights lawsuit, I’m moving on to the next step. In the Name of Mississippi is contemporary...

Continue reading

Wiping the Slate Clean

You know when you’ve solved a complex calculus equation, and you take the eraser and literally wipe the slate clean? I did that last week with my writing career. Three acceptances triggered the erasure: First, I was accepted into the Community Writers Workshop in the Virtual Valley for July of this year. This fabulous writers...

Continue reading

Where Do We Go from Here?

The revisions to my Mississippi novel have reached the “listening to the computer read to me” stage. I’ve received wonderfully helpful feedback from Beta readers and spent 2 months implementing it. “Implementing” sounds so neutral, but I wrote another 20,000 words and revised the ones I already had on the page. Now...

Continue reading

That Which Soothes When All Begins to Crumble

Though I welcomed—after our terror subsided—the stillness of our shelter-in-place life, we who had been circling and circling for years, the last few days I have felt as if I might crumble, my “dust to dust” having become friable, my feet of clay exposed, a descending that was not helped when the priest who understood me and yet...

Continue reading

Lord, This Wore Me Down

(I INTRODUCED this set of book reviews here. This is the 4th in the series) Pedro ParamoJuan Rulfo (set in Mexico, pub 1955)Plot Summary: man returns to (literal) ghost town searching for his father This is the second time in as many reviews that I find myself reviewing a book not for its writing or character development or dialogue or...

Continue reading

How Do You Choose What to Read?

(I INTRODUCED this set of book reviews here. This is the 3rd in the series) The Transmigration of BodiesYuri Herrera (set somewhere in Mexico, pub 2016)Plot Summary: During a killing plague, a fixer is called to solve a dispute between two crime families Goodreads reviews are to advise other readers whether they want to read the book or...

Continue reading