Any Excuse to Party
Today, Tuesday, April 27, is National Little Pampered Dog Day in the United States. Now that’s an excuse to party if I ever heard one. Her name is Emmie, and she is eight months and one week old today.
Read more
Author: Connie Berry
Are You Ready For A Change?
Spring has definitely arrived in my part of world. Not a moment too soon. Leaves are unfurling. Birdsong fills the[…]
Read more
Conflict, Suspense, Terror: When Is Too Much Too Much?
Almost the first thing a budding writer learns is the importance of conflict—internal, external, situational, relational. Conflict is what creates[…]
Read more
Do You Follow Instructions?
Following directions has never been my strength. Cooking, for example. I rarely use a recipe, and when I do, I[…]
Read more
A Writer’s Retreat of My Own
I’ve always been a bit in awe—and not a little jealous—when I read on social media that an author is heading out for a writer’s retreat. It’s the ultimate luxury in my book—days spent in uninterrupted thinking/plotting/writing. Here are my Top Ten reasons why a writer’s retreat is worth its weight in gold.
Read more
Do You Have A Lover’s Eye?
Do you have a Lover’s Eye? No, I’m not talking about winking and fluttering your lashes. A Lover’s Eye is a tiny portrait of a human eye, often painted on a flake of ivory no bigger than your fingernail.
Read more
Length Matters: How Many Words Does It Take?
How long is a sentence? The answer I got in junior high school was “long enough to finish the thought.” Cheeky.
For years, the longest sentence ever written in English was said to be Molly Bloom’s 3,687-word soliloquy in the James Joyce novel Ulysses (1922). However, one of the finalists for the 2019 Booker Prize was Lucy Ellman, whose 1,000-page Ducks, Newburyport consists mostly of a single sentence that runs to 426,000 words. Beat that if you can.
Read more
It Was A Dark & Stormy Night: Weather in Fiction
“Weather tonight: dark. Turning partly light by morning.”
Who remembers George Carlin, the Hippy Dippy Weatherman? A whole generation of viewers in the 1970s laughed at his weather forecasts, but the silliness struck a chord. People are obsessed with the weather. Even in books.
Hope, Faith & a Corpse
Midwesterner turned Californian Laura Jensen Walker arrived on the cozy mystery scene in the middle of a pandemic with not one but two new series.
When I began writing my first cozy (A Grave Affair, featuring a recently divorced woman in her forties who moved to a small town to start over), there was a minor woman Episcopal priest character. As I continued writing, that woman priest made it quite clear to me that she was a main character deserving of her own story.
Read more
Whining Won’t Help: Research in the Time of the Plague
I’m thirty thousand words into my new Kate Hamilton book and feeling generally out of sorts because I should be in England right now….I feel like whining.
Read more