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Pipe Dreams

September 15, 2010

Image via Wikipedia I find it curious that my all of favorite writers were smokers. J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Edward Abbey, William Faulkner—all of these wordsmiths were avid devotees of either pipes or cigars (or both). So why is it that writing and tobacco seem to be such close bedfellows? For [...]

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Exercise and Writing: Majoring in the Minors

September 8, 2010

Image via Wikipedia I cannot believe I am even putting these two activities together in a title. Individually, each carry enough anxiety to my heart and in some cases a huge amount of disappointment. At any given point in time, there is a huge possibility that goals set for either task are slipping further and [...]

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Is a Good Mystery Hard to Find? Part II: The Lehane Addiction

August 6, 2010

Cover of Shutter Island: A Novel One of our blog readers made an excellent point in response to Part I of this series of blog posts (Thank you Katie!). She stated that most mysteries are more plot-driven than character-driven. This explains why in some mystery novels, the characters seem a little flat. Luckily, I believe [...]

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The New Archetypes Part 1

July 19, 2010

Image via Wikipedia Archetypes in the movies is certainly nothing new.  It’s almost impossible to discuss Star Wars (OT obviously) without talking about heroic archetypes and heroes’ journeys.  Many of those archetypes are so ancient that they are as old as storytelling itself.  Movies aren’t ancient but they seem to have had quite an effect on storytelling in [...]

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Palimpsest by Gore Vidal

June 25, 2010

Cover of Palimpsest: A Memoir Palimpsest is Gore Vidal’s first memoir. Early on in the book, he makes the point that this is not an autobiography, but a memoir. Too many autobiographies read like an excuse for the author’s failings and a platform for their supposed triumphs, as though they are getting their two cents [...]

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