Posts by author:

Rose Gonsoulin

How to deal with Feedback

March 3, 2010

So you’ve finished the latest draft of the epistle you’ve been slaving over for longer than you care to admit. Maybe it’s a short story, or a novel or screenplay, doesn’t matter – it’s the baby you’ve been nursing along. And now you’ve gotten feedback. Of course it included some positive comments, that’s de rigueur [...]

Read the full article →

Book Review: The Road To Wellville by T. C. Boyle

February 3, 2010

Image via Wikipedia

Fort Collins, Colorado selected the author T. C. Boyle for their One Book, One Town event.  They chose Tortilla Curtain to read and then celebrate as a community. Unfamiliar with his work, I picked up The Road to Wellville for a few bucks at a used book store.
The prose was erudite and pleonastic from [...]

Read the full article →

Lazy Susan: A Poem For Losers

January 6, 2010

Lazy Susan
I am the hare/the one that never gets there.
The beast that toils the least.
A million beginnings.
A zero for endings.
Spinning around/twirling in place.
It’s like running a treadmill race.
Even this verse/it pays the price.
Treading old ground/covering everything twice.

Read the full article →

Dialogue Tags

December 23, 2009

Dialogue tags. Or Snags.  I took the long route when it comes to tagging dialogue.  Under the mistaken belief that the snappier, more interesting and unusual my tags, the better dialogue, ergo the better story I’d create.  After attending a couple of workshops, to my horror, I learned that the list of fifty plus creative [...]

Read the full article →

Shock & Awe: Surprise Endings

September 28, 2009

I recently read a short story where out of the blue and with no warning, the main character dropped dead, stopping the story cold.  Though it was intended to be a surprise ending with an ironic, poignant twist, it felt more like a cheap shot — plain old shock value for shock’s sake.
The problem with [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries