Today I’m presenting workshops at the Chanticleer Authors Conference, so I’m sharing a “retro” trip to Las Vegas a few years ago. A naturopath friend had urged Thor and me to visit the Red Rock canyons near Las Vegas for … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: April 2016
Weave and spin, weave and spin… (When is China not China? or, What is this thing called fantasy, really?) I spend half my life living in dreams, in alternate realities. That might sound bizarre to some, even verging on … Continue reading
I heard part of a piece about Wendell Berry on NPR the other day. It focused on the importance of knowing the place where you’re from. In the piece, Laura Dunn, who recently made a film about Berry (The Seer), … Continue reading
I like bread. I like to bake it, even though I’m not great at it. I used to be better before living in Montana and having kids. I just didn’t get it done there and so I’m waaaay out of … Continue reading
You learned it in ninth grade English, right? Almost every short story starts with rising action, moves through complications, reaches a climax, and ends with falling action. Novels work the same way. And so should your scenes. Many times, new … Continue reading
“Pleased to meet you,” the bartender said, shaking Jon’s hand. “You must be Jon Chandler. I think you ought to know that Colonel Mustard hired a man to sabotage your friend’s brakes. He’s a bad one, that Colonel.” The writer of … Continue reading
Actually not the horse kind. The human kind. This week, I asked fellow writers to ask questions about what they want or need to know about handling and living with horses. Writer and artist M.C.A. Hogarth responded with a great … Continue reading
(This is the sixteenth installment of Dice Tales, an ongoing series of posts about RPGs as storytelling.) *** We’ve been talking about some of the tools used in RPGs to help ensure that everybody’s interacting with roughly the same mental … Continue reading
“It is only a novel… or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of … Continue reading