I’m a quitter. I’ll admit it. I’ve decided that I don’t have time to finish books I’m not enjoying. Over the last month, I have picked up and almost immediately set down again two novels in particular…
Once upon a time, there was a highly intelligent, gifted young writer who lived in a far away land and didn’t have any writing friends…
I’ve just returned home from a celebration honoring a guy you might have heard about before. His name is Aaron Pogue, and he is a published author…
Watch them when they don’t know you’re watching.
Tweet Well, as I said last Thursday, in light of my ridiculously busy fall schedule, I’ve been toying with the idea of dropping my weekly Technical Writing series here at Unstressed Syllables. At the same time, I said I thought I’d probably have last week’s series for you this week. I don’t. I received a […]
Zombie stories aren’t about scary grossness — they’re about characters. The survivors and how they overcome or succumb to hardship: that is what zombie stories are about. And that, gentle readers, is what each of our stories should be about, no matter what our chosen genre…
Georges Polti’s The thirty-Six Dramatic Situations serves as interesting reference material because of his basic premise: that there’s no such thing as an original plot. Humankind exhausted its store of fresh, new situations long ago; “there is nothing new under the sun…”
Part of my joy in writing has always been finding out what makes people tick and integrating that knowledge into my characters. I also wanted to use my talents to help others, so psychology seemed a great fit. Much to my dismay, I discovered fairly early on that to pursue this vocation to its fullest, I would need at least a master’s degree, if not a doctorate…
I am technologically illiterate. I am not up on the latest gadgets, gizmos, whizgigs, and whatsits. Facebook was around a good five years before I even heard of it, and I resisted Twitter for as long as I possibly could. Printer cables mystify me… So when this fellow writer, she of the sparkly vegetarian blood-suckers, confronted me with this alien creature known as playlist.com, I almost didn’t know what to do with myself…
…After I read Aaron’s comment, I realized that here, at Unstressed Syllables, I have, in fact, not been talking about sestinas at all. What a horrid oversight on my part. I do believe it’s high time I rectified this.
At first glance, a sestina is nothing more than a rhyming poem of six six-line stanzas with a tercet…
