A few years back I read the Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo. If you haven’t read it, you might think it was a tragic, sad love story. It certainly is that, but it is also a book about architecture. The reference to the Paris cathedral is not just for the setting, you see. In this …
Welkin This word means simply “sky” or “the heavens”. It is an antiquated word that descends from the Old English wolcen. I doubt you’ll get much practical use out of it, but it is occasionally used in the phrase, “the ringing of the welkin” to signal when something momentous is occurring or is about to occur. …
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne My rating: 5 of 5 stars I can’t say enough about what an enjoyable journey this was. The characters were vivid and charming, the plot brisk (once it got going), and the language and descriptions were superb. Phileas Fogg, the main character, proved “equal to the …
City of Ember is a delight. Though much of the narrative is filled with tension it has a homey quality to it that makes the story curiously gentle in the telling.
Every good story has a hero. Those heroes are not perfect, but they are quite often more noble than many of us. And that’s a good thing. Because a literary hero quite often becomes a friend, at least for the time that we read the story and perhaps long after. And friends can pull us …
Chapter titles and tables of contents: do we really need them? I recently had an exchange online with another writer who was convinced they were completely unnecessary. She rattled off a list of books which I hadn’t heard of. None of them contained tables of contents. So I poked around on my book shelf …
Welcome to a new feature for the site- “Wednesday’s Word”. This represents something new for me, something a little more “practical” to allow me to post things here more regularly when there are not book-related updates. Since my site is available as a subscription on Amazon I thought it might be good to actually give people …
So far spring has been a season for editing for me with a little time off woven in as well so I haven’t updated the site in a while. But I just wanted to throw out a quick announcement about the free promotion currently running for Into the Vast. The book is getting a lot of …
