My Agent Told Me To Make A Blog

Touring the grounds and palace of Versailles sparked all sorts of ideas for stories and settings. My husband and I visited Paris early on in our relationship (during the trip, he went from boyfriend to fiancee :D). Let me tell you something--I really underestimated how cold France is during March. Our visit to Versailles was quite the adventure. For starters, we had to take the metro farther outside the city than we'd ever been, which involved upgrading our train passes (a confusing and expensive ordeal). The ride itself was long and allowed a view of Paris rolling past us. Heart of the city and out through the suburbs. And a bunch of French highschoolers getting on and off from our cabin. Versailles itself is divided into two parts--the mansion, and the grounds. Getting the tickets for each was another confusing and expensive ordeal, with the longest queue you've ever seen. It turns out we really shouldn't have gone in March. Half the place was closed off, the res...

This was written for an informal contest with the following prompt: "BURN AFTER READING" was all the book said. The spine was a match striker, the outside contained a single match. I decided to try for a Lovecraftian style, heavily influenced by The Nameless City . --- Sand shifted in currents through the ruined city. Even with my scarf and gloves, grit found its way into my mouth and the folds of my skin as I lumbered over uneven hills. Some dunes piled into high banks against the crumbling buildings, almost swallowing them, while others spread so thin I could see the cobbled road beneath them. And always, even under the intense midday sun, I stopped at every flash of shadow and held my breath. It had been well over a decade since the Horrors ravaged this city and moved on, but I couldn’t help imagining their long, spindly arms reaching around this corner, or their yawning mouths and pit-like eyes peering from beneath that outcrop. It had been drilled into me: cities...

I swear I didn't forget to blog, I just had the death plague for a while. And then had an inpatient that needed overnight monitoring, and the whole not-getting-any-sleep thing had a butterfly effect on the rest of the week. I'm bad at blogging, particularly the "thinking of things to blog about" part. In order to keep things fresh, I'm going to add in some new subjects. I might start doing some "critique" posts, since that's something I both love and spend a lot of time doing (which may or may not require sacrificial lambs to give me work to chew). More certainly, however, I'll start posting flash fiction regularly. I'm accumulating a lot of entries from informal and formal contests alike, often with bizarre prompts, so that should be fun. You can expect the first flash story next week!

Medical technology gets more newfangled every day, and some of the things we can do in human medicine is getting close to Star Trek. But something people tend to forget is that most things that can be done in humans, can also be done in animals. They usually aren't , but that's not because we can't ! However, here are some of the more common advanced or interesting surgeries we tend to do on pets... 1. Rewire salivary glands to act as tear ducts. If the tear ducts don't work, the eyes get all dried out and then they stop working, too. Surgeons can work their magic to re-plumb the tiny ducts from the salivaries up into the eyes instead of the mouth. Then the pet cries when it eats. Not kidding. 2. Plant chemotherapy beads or gel inside their brain. I mention this one because I actually had a patient go through brain surgery. The neurosurgeon did a bunch of CT scans to pinpoint the tumor, then they went in through an area a bit above and between the eyes. I believe...

As a reader, I always was, and still am, fairly oblivious to the behind-the-scenes magic tricks authors use. Even now that I've seen the ropes and gears, I can get swept up and forget about them. That's the magic of reading, really. You know it's not real, but you believe in it anyway. Or rather, you suspend your disbelief, as they say. Learning the craft of writing is essentially learning how to maintain that suspension of disbelief for the reader. You can have a dragon division to the airforce or make stars explode or give someone the ability to phase through walls, yet it feels like it could be real--like those people might be out there somewhere, battling with those decisions and living with those consequences. There's a big bag of tricks we use in writing, in how information is delivered, which things we direct attention to, even the nuts and bolts of line breaks and scene breaks. In the end, I'd say it all comes down to keeping the reader gripped. However,...

Stephen King's On Writing is widely touted as not only an excellent resource, but a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the writer's life and thought process. I think there is some good writing advice, but I mainly enjoyed it as an interesting nonfiction read about his life and how he came to be where he is now. I know a lot of literary folks like to sneer down at Stephen King's proletarian writing style, but hey, us proles love it. I read On Writing super fast, faster than I'd read anything in years. I read a few other things in between, and the next book I found myself ripping through was 'Salem's Lot. I told my coworker, "I haven't gone through a book this quickly since... Well, since the other Stephen King book I read." I find his voice conversational and entertaining, his characters full and lovable, and his settings delightfully close to home. Sneer all you want, but he's still a good storyteller. For those who've only read his ...