What Are You Reading?

[image: a little night reading] [photo by Zsuzsanna Kilian]Writers are readers. We get our ideas for stories, characters, complications and solutions from reading. We pick up new words and new ways to use old words. We absorb cadence, rhythm, pulse.

Any mystery-lover who reads A Long, Hard Look will see the influence of, not just Chandler, but Christie, Francis, Stout, and Asimov; perhaps even a twist of Richard Halliburton. The homage to Chandler is intentional, and Phil Brennan owes as much to Archie Goodwin as to Philip Marlowe.

There’s a cooking competition show called Chopped (more…)

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The Timed-Release Capsule and Growth Through Use; or, Where the Ideas Come From

We ask where great ideas and creativity come from, not because the question itself matters, but because we want to go there in order to find more.

[image: photo http://www.sxc.hu/photo/635810 by OBMonkey http://www.sxc.hu/profile/OBMonkey” width=”200″ height=”289″ class=”alignright size-full wp-image-2413]Reading Steven Pressfield’s take on the question prompted a visceral response with my own beliefs.

We are, in part, Divine, fashioned by a creator to be creators. Thus, creativity is built into us like a time-release capsule.

Except it’s not released by time. You can wait till the cows come home and if you don’t add the activating ingredient to the capsule, it will never release.

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Snowflake People: Backstory to the Rescue

[image: Chef Joel]I’ve finished 3 mysteries, with a solid first draft of a fourth and half a draft of another. The first, Through the Fog, was a solo project, a lark, a few years ago. This year, I got more serious with A Long, Hard Look and dug a little deeper for Into the Fog, the second of my foggy Irish mysteries.

The first editing note Tom Bentley sent regarding Into the Fog mentioned that its protagonist sounded a lot like the chap in A Long, Hard Look.

All I could think was, wait ’til he reads anodyne.

All three protagonists (wait; there’s a fourth, a woman) speak with my voice. There are subtle differences, but I’ve made the mistake of allowing my writer’s voice to overwhelm these characters’ individuality.

They’re all too much me. I guess I have so many faces I want to use them all. But that’s confusing for readers.

O woe is me. How to fix?

Tom’s first suggestion sounded familiar. That’s because I’ve been recommending it to my business coaching clients since before I wrote The Commonsense Entrepreneur in 2008.

This is why we hire others: so they can help us see, over here, what we’ve been doing for 6 long years over here.

Write What Who You Know

I’d like to introduce you to Eileen Thomasina Armstrong, 36. (She sure doesn’t like her middle name.) Here are some things you might like to know about her: (more…)

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