As I sat down to supper, I noticed that Ray had left long, purple marker streaks on the table when she was making elephant pictures last night. This led, naturally enough, to experiments: what takes purple marker off a Southwestern-style table? Water doesn’t.Murhy’s oil soap doesn’t.But magic erasers do. After seeing exactly what the magic […]

Carrie’s presentation. She showed a scene from Medium in which a mother and daughter are waiting in a doctor’s office. The daughter is called in and tells her mother she doesn’t need to come with her, she’ll be fine. Too much time passes, the mother asks what’s taking so long, the nurse discovers the door

Carrie Vaughn read a suspenseful scene from her third book, Kitty Takes a Holiday. She explains the techniques she used: CV: I use pacing. I like little cliff-hanger chapter breaks. I like to end with a “gunshot moment,” a shocking image or event. Let the reader absorb it. Smell, memory is tied to smell. I

A caveat: I tried to catch everything I could, but I missed a lot and paraphrased even more. PPW: How can scaring your readers be combined with other genres? CV: Horros can be found in anything; it’s a trope rather than a genre. Like suspense. There’s scaring someone versus grossing them out. Making readers think

November 3 was the PPW workshop, “Scaring Your Readers.” Steve Rasnic Tem, Melanie Tem, and Carrie Vaughn attended; Ed Bryant was ill and missed. Turns out writers, both amateurs and professional, like to talk about random stuff that just happens to be interesting. I could get used to this… A caveat: I tried to catch

A list of foreign words (and phrases) for which there is no good English translation, part of a book named Toujours Tingo, by Adam Jacot de Boinod (a forthcoming sequel to The Meaning of Tingo). “Snyavshi Shtany, PO VOLOSAM NE GLADYAT – Russian: once you’ve taken off your pants it’s too late to look at

“Mrs. Keunecke,” Nancy said. She wasn’t shouting. Anybody walking on the sidewalk might have overheard her, but there wasn’t anybody on the sidewalk, not in February before school let out. “Surely you’ve heard about me. I’ve lived in this town most of my life. People know me. I’m no lady, Mrs. Keunecke. I’m rough and

Grant Wood, of “American Gothic” fame, painted a picture of the Hoover cottage being shown off by a tour guide: The Brithplace of Herbert Hoover. It wouldn’t have been accurate, but I wish he’d painted Isis in the shadow of the trees off to the right. Rob Wood (no relation?) painted a bird’s-eye view of

Another Iron Road bit: Another fantasy. Whatever had taken out the rails had been quick, rough, and almost certainly loud. The railroad ties, which were old but good enough to reuse (there were fewer of them lying around, from what she could tell), had shattered and splintered, in some places even turning to sawdust. The

After WWI, President Hoover received a bronze statue of the Egyptian Goddess Isis from a group of Belgian schoolchildren, soldiers, and refugees. Whatever possessed them to pick Isis, I’m not sure. At the time, Isis was considered the Goddess of Life. The inscription at the base of the statue (not at the base of the