a dress is not worth so much as this. the fight should not have happened. cotton and stitch. But it’s mine after all, I am not to blame. I didn’t tell her to go. she had plenty to wear. So what if it matched her gray sweater. I should have gone like she…
Tag: writing
Five elegies (Elegy 1: the mother)
gone. (looking at palm) the hand feels empty. madman. flashing: gray, black, white. a little girl in bathing suit, squirting water from the hose at the camera. gone. why not some other mother’s baby? she wonders: will the body ache for the loss of love like the ache after birth for the loss of…
The Wolf at His Door…
My third novel, The Wolf at His Door, is finally out. This marks a genre jump for me as I’ve moved to a M/M romance, werewolf, murder-mystery novel. Synopsis The wolf in his town… In the last two weeks, five innocent people have vanished, leaving investigators without a clue and families in turmoil. The wolf…
Putting the Super in Supernatural Sex by Adrian Lilly
This is a guest blog I did discussing supernatural sex scenes. Enjoy!
It’s time to people watch like a big-time creeper!
Personally, I enjoy character research. It’s an excuse to people watch. Every new person I meet is fodder for a character. I think people watching offers a great window into understanding character interactions. Among other things, It can help with: dialogue mannerisms traits background Some of my favorite places for people watching are parks, coffeehouses,…
My eyes are deceiving me
Can you trust your eyes and ears? Can we trust the eyes and ears of a character? Playing with narrator reliability can be fun, but it’s a double-edged sword. Readers must never feel tricked or lied to, so substantiating the unreliability of a first-person narrator is important. “I’m a liar. I’m a known liar, that’s…
Let’s talk about sex, baby
Ah, the sex scene. Some writers seem to love the lurid detail and intimacy of a graphic sex scene. For others, the idea of intimate detail is a bit more difficult to approach. In my writing, I have mostly done the movie equivalent of “the camera pans away as things get hot and heavy.” In…
What lies beneath?
For me really good acting is about subtext. Clive Owen Strong characters and strong stories often have subtext*–the story underneath that tells us more about our humanity, in some instances, than the main story. I think this is especially true in horror stories. At the front we have something sinister, horrific, terrifying, but the subtext…
Red Haze, Book Excerpt
~January~ Spring Rush Week Chapter 1: Thursday An obsidian silence unfurled around Marne Montgomery as she stepped out of earshot of the Greek side of campus. Her heels clicked on the sidewalk, a sharp crack in the night air. Marne cast her eyes from side-to-side, suspicious of the shadows washing toward the sidewalk, like the…
A thought for today: inspiration
Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it. —Bob Dylan The inspiration for an idea for a story, poem, or novel is sometimes immediate—you have an ‘a-ha’ moment where a thought floods you. What’s harder is finding the inspiration to complete a project. I look for motivation in…
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