Who am I? My name is Christine, and I’m writing this because I’m full of opinions I like to share. I don’t even know if anyone’s out there listening, but right now I’m listening to soft, overly sentimental romantic rock music and pouring my heart into next week’s blog post. (Didn’t We Almost Have it […]

Us writers can learn a lot from Pavlov and his dog. That our bodies respond to familiar stimuli is a well-known and well-researched fact, and we can see it in our lives in many subtle ways. The most basic are the cues for mealtimes. Like the bell that made Pavlov’s dog salivate, we will find […]

There is a certain comfort in familiarity, a sense of togetherness in a group you’ve known for years, and an understandable need to belong. Yet for writers, there is a danger in sticking close to one group of peers for too long, a danger I will call groupthink. Have you ever noticed how groups tend […]

I’m sure you’re familiar with the dreaded info dump: that ocean of background and setup which causes even the most talented swimmers to drown beneath waves of irrelevance and get swept away by tides of boredom. If you’ll just throw me a life preserver — a tidbit of conflict that makes the information more meaningful, […]

My fingers dance across the keyboard as I search for the next word to type. First person present tense annoys me, I think, because one cannot usually record events as they are happening. At the moment, my butt is in a chair, my eyes fixed on the screen before me, my fingers tap, tap, tapping […]

Hungry young writers often snap up writing advice as if they were starving, internalizing it and making it part of a core truth. It is tempting. We spend most of our lives accepting the word of authority figures, beginning with parents and teachers. I sometimes wonder what I believe without question that is exactly wrong. […]

In the genre of romantic fantasy, I will accept that spark of lust that occurs when two people notice one another for the first time, and the physical desire that underlies each new encounter. Heck, chemistry is important. I will even accept those things when they seem a bit larger than life, exaggerated for the […]