Welcome!
Recent Blogs
Beekeeping in Mill Valley
My son and I have been keeping bees on the back of my Mill Valley property for a couple of years. (He suggested that I needed to do something in my life other than writing, which was becoming somewhat obsessive.) He had learned beekeeping back in northeast Ohio when he was twelve years old. He
Body Language
Many tools are available to writers to make characters real and three-dimensional. The most obvious are physical description and dialogue. Everyone in the world looks unique in some way, or at least unlike all the others we meet in a lifetime (there are of course identical twins, and rare cases of body-doubles that dictators are
Friends and Characters
I made a new friend at a dinner party a couple of weeks ago. I knew because I felt that prickle of interest that takes place between a man and a woman, and I’m told can take place between any two people regardless of gender. I generally am more comfortable with women friends than men
Fresh Thoughts
Given the nature of this website and my nature as a professional writer, you would expect a steady stream of blogs about writing. But I would not want to claim your time and attention for so tedious a task. I was receiving some bodywork the other day (I can recommend it without qualification for all
Getting It Right
I’ve just finished writing a novel. It was hard work, and took more than a year. That’s fast, considering that my earlier books took anywhere from three to ten years to complete. But after creating the story, the hardest job in getting across the finish line is making corrections. No one writes clean copy the
The Road Not Taken
Of the many predictable questions writers are asked (what time of day do you write being perhaps the most common) one that asks for a real response is: where do you get your ideas? Some teachers have advised me that I should sit down every day and write whatever comes into my head for twenty
Dixon Long
