I will always remember what I was told after I revealed in 2013 I was writing Passports and showed the initial draft first to my (English) Mrs., and then to an English woman friend. Having read it, separately they both noticed that I was inadvertently mixing American-English language forms and British-English.
Writers: NEVER EVER EVER apologize for YOUR imagination and YOUR creations.
Over the previous three years, I had also fictionalized her in three novels, the last being that one above. In them I included reconstructions of various real-life interactions and even disagreements between us from back when I was in my 20s and young 30s. She never knew I had sneakily done that.
I read none of my Conventions manuscript yesterday beyond glimpsing its cover on Instagram and here in my post about it. I’m taking a few days away from the late 1700s to […]
During our phone chat a few weeks ago (because we weren’t able to get together as hoped), my uncle told me that (based on what he’d read so far) he considered what […]
Yes, I wrote just the other day that I planned some time off. Well, I lasted two days. I have plunged now into fully outlining what had been the sketchy ideas I […]
American Revolutionary patriot and diplomat, Benjamin Franklin, is quoted as once saying, “Either do something worth reading about, or write something worth reading.” As writers, most of us probably lean a bit […]
Welcome here to my semi-weekly journal covering novel writing, travel, international matters, and whatever related that pops to mind…. sometimes seriously, sometimes rather less so. The center (centre) of my authoring universe. I hope you enjoy your visit.
Edward: “I hope I may be quite honest with you that I will be quite pleased for the opportunity to become far better acquainted with Miss Sánchez once we reach Holland…”
Robert: “My friend who wrote that letter, he’s passed eighty now. When I was in Paris fifty years ago, where I met him, he loved her dearly. And, oh, Nancy, how she loved him…”
Béatrice: “We will all of us have a drink to everyone we remember and love.”
Bill: “Fiction comes from fact, and lots of fact makes great fiction when you re-write it as fiction.”
Valérie: “Because you are born on a farm, this does not make you a horse!”
Isabelle: “I’ll set the table… This is better than a restaurant. Oh, and by when I leave… I expect you will have told me all about General de Gaulle also.”
