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The place has been renovated and the door is open. Come on in and take a load off! |
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Hello and welcome. My name is Jack, and for around a decade, my "muse," whatever you conceive that to be, has been lying in a coma, rising occasionally to spout a line or two of gibberish, then falling back into oblivion. While I wait for her return, I offer reviews and this blog. Feel free to partake, but don't get too excited; the wake is still in progress. But thanks for your support, by the way. You guys are the best! Jack... 
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Good morning, all. Today I inaugurate a new practice, one in which I highlight good, solid stories that I've read. This is number one, and a fitting start as I review a story of alien invasion ~ maybe ~ that has no aliens, no drooling monsters, no spacecraft. Just a network of lethal... Well, I don't want to give away too much. Just let me say that this is the most original premise I've encountered in years, maybe decades. Well worth a read, folks. You can thank me later... J |
| I love the time change, don't you? I wake up in the middle of the night, eyes burning yet through sleeping, with a rotten little headache that's going to be with me all day... Or at least until I pass out for a nap mid-afternoon, since I've been up since zero-dark-thirty despite the hour I spent trying to force myself back to sleep. This is gonna be a six-cup day, I'm thinking! But I do love the return to Standard Time. I love the nighttime. It's cozy, romantic, easy on the eyes, and carries just a hint of danger, and I hate being robbed of it for 7½ months every year. Of course, I live at about 32° north latitude, and I do understand the need for folks up north to see the sun come up before about 9:00 AM, but it sure buggars up my internal clock for a few days. All right, enough of that. I'm going to go drink the first pot straight out of the spout, and I'll be back in a bit with some new material I've been working on. Once it goes up, you can tell me how you like it, and whether it's a path I should continue along. See you soon... Stay inspired! ~ Jack ![Merit Badge in Wings of the Angel Army
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Good morning, and welcome back. I've decided to reopen this blog, though it could be a while between entries, but I've come to terms with my status as a writer and I wanted to get this restarted on a milestone. The first of the month seemed appropriate. For a detailed dissertation on my new role, check out "Time for an Honest Assessment"  . Meanwhile, like I said, I don't know how often this will get serviced, but every time anything comes to mind, it will appear here. I suspect that the entries here will consist of observations; topics for discussion will appear at "Scribblers' Den" .Okay, I'm reaching for content here. That's my "grand statement." Now I'm off to live it. Stay inspired, ~ Jack |
"Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all." ~ KATHERINE MANSFIELD Looking back to my last entry, it seems pretty dark and negative, which is not entirely unwarranted given my current condition. But look, I self-identify as a writer and I never want to lose that, so I continue to hammer away, and I guess we'll find out together whether inspiration can be replaced by determination. I've been told that perseverance is a highly underrated virtue. I mean to test that theory. True to the little poem that introduces this blog, I intend to keep a'scratchin. The "barmaids" of the poem, personalities given to my muses, whatever you consider them to be, haven't completely abandoned me. They continue to drop in from time to time to see how I'm doing, and occasionally bring an idea with them. I'm not entirely at full-stop here. There are stories lurking just beyond the lamplight that I'm trying to coax in, and these are aside from the old stuff that I'm posting here as if they're new. Stories like "Serpens Alatus" , which is going up piecemeal; have to maintain the suspense, after all.But no, there are new things in the offing. I'm currently trying to press forward on a fantasy centered on a band of orcs who inadvertently become the heroes of the tale. Apologies to my beta reader; I'm giving this my full attention and hope to break it loose soon. Also in the queue is a story of a young man who allows himself to be possessed by a demon in order to take revenge, fully aware that demons don't work for free. There is a short about a medical examiner who has an unusual experience while working late. That will be perfect for "Invalid Item" when it eventually finishes up. Tales of Dutchman's Flat, a small community in the great southwestern desert, await development as do the stories of teens on the cusp of adulthood growing up in Sunset Beach, a fictional community based on the wonderful little California beach town where I spent my formative years.So you see, I'm far from stuck. I need to change my writing habits, because jumping in first thing in the morning isn't getting it done. Perhaps I need to cogitate on the plots while I complete the household chores, then hit it hard right after lunch. That will be the next thing I try, anyway. It isn't that I don't want to write; I most certainly do! I just need to find a new approach that works. The exploration continues. So I ask that you not give up on me. The barmaids haven't, and they're integral to the process. I'm thinking that I'll get it. Just hang in there. That's what I'm doing. And until next time, keep safe and have fun. You guys are the best! Taylor   |
"A perfect judge will read each word of wit With the same spirit that its author writ." ~ ALEXANDER POPE Now, we all know this isn't a cooking site, notwithstanding the fabulous recipes that can be found on our pages, but if it were, it seems reasonable to assume that our "dishes" would be our stories. And when you look at a recipe and say, "that sounds tasty," what is it that you're actually looking at? I mean, spaghetti is spaghetti, cornbread is cornbread, a pork roast is a pork roast, right? Why do you like Wendy's better than McDonalds? They're both hamburgers aren't they? So, what makes one plate of the same food by the same name better than another? My contention is that it must be the spices used in the recipe, and what is the one spice that's used over all the thousands of ground this, chopped that, and blended stuff in every dish? Salt. The most common spice, the wise pharaoh of spices sitting at the front of the spice rack, the one common denominator among them; it appears to some degree in every dish. Okay, I can feel your fingers tapping on those mouse buttons, so I'm going to get to the point: Every story needs its basic spice, salt, to some degree. And that spice is Suspense. But wait, you say, I'm not writing a thriller. This is a meet-cute romance. That doesn't matter. Every reader of prose fiction wants a problem, a villain, some sand in the gears. She isn't reading to see what color shirt the gentleman chose for their date, she wants to see how the soon-to-be happy couple deal with what life throws at them. Does that mean they have to be stalked by a serial killer while they're on their first date? Of course not! There are different types and levels of suspense appropriate to any style and genre, and I'm going to take a look at them here. THE TICKING CLOCK: This is the most obvious of all of suspense's flavors, and the most obvious of the obvious is when it's attached to a bomb. Think Goldfinger, when James Bond is chained to a nuclear device and manages to stop the countdown with, what else, 007 left on the timer. But one needn't be this ham-fisted about it. Perhaps one of your romantic leads has to return to the big city and their highfalutin' job on Sunday evening, and the potential partner has to win their heart by then. That's the ticking clock, and there's your suspense; page-turning guaranteed. OBSTACLES IN THE HERO'S PATH: Indiana Jones made a career of this, but every obstacle doesn't have to be a giant, rolling boulder. Maybe your young heroine wants to make a special cake for what is sure to be her grandfather's last birthday... but she's out of baking powder... and there's a blizzard raging outside. What will she do? Move Heaven and Earth to overcome this obstacle, that's what! A DARK SECRET: I think it was Dean Koontz I heard in a radio interview who said, "Everyone has a secret that they would kill or die to protect, and once you know what the secret is, the character will jump off the page." That isn't exactly what I mean, but you can see how it works. Once someone else holds your secret, your whole focus becomes who has it, what will they do with it, how can I minimize the damage if they reveal it? By coincidence (and maybe what inspired this), I was watching a British crime drama last night. The lead detective took her messenger bag to lunch and sat reviewing case files on suspects as she ate. When she got up to leave, she had left one in the booth. She ran back to recover it, but it was gone. Who has it, what will they do with it? The suspense is nearly painful. MAKE FAILURE HURT: In a word, consequences. If any of the dozen characters in Lord of the Rings failed, Sauron would have taken over the world. There were devastating consequences of losing that file in the show last night. They don't have to be that drastic, but if your character can fail and shrug it off with an "Oh, well," you're doing it wrong. BRING A RIVAL TO THE DANCE: This plays right into romance. The MCs have met, things look to be going well, and then another suiter arrives with eyes for nothing but the ingenue. He's wealthier, better looking, charming, intelligent, but the reader knows he's also a bastard, and all wrong for our heroine. How will the guy who's right for her win her hand? But this isn't just a romance ploy. One of my favorite games is XCOM, which depicts Earth's fight for survival against an alien invasion. You need to respond to the aliens' incursions, reverse-engineer their technology as you collect bits and pieces, and win the fight for Earth. But a couple of game-months into it, you discover there is another organization opposing the aliens. But their mission is very different. They want to secure the aliens' technology and use it to subjugate humanity. That rivalry ramps up the tension exponentially, as any good rivalry will. DESIRES AND NEEDS: Everyone wants something, and that goes for characters in books as well, at least it should. A person may be a cop, a driver for a car parts store, or a shelf-stocker at Target, but that's his job. There are things he wants to do, to be, to experience, and if he has a chance to come closer to attaining one of those desires, what effect will it have on his job or the plot of your story? There should be a conflict there, and keeping it in play keeps the reader turning pages. KEEP A SUBPLOT RUNNING: This is an example I call the "rats in the basement." Your main character is a young prosecutor with some experience, but he's not a grizzled veteran of the trial wars. He's been handed an important case against a mob figure, and if he screws it up, this guy will walk to continue his life of crime. The lawyer has what he needs to win, but he has also been through a bitter divorce with a vindictive wife who has custody of the daughter he adores. She has just informed him that she intends to remarry and accompany her new husband to his home... in Australia. Meaning he may not see his daughter again for a very long time. How will he deal with this ticking clock of a subplot, and what consequences will it have for his case if he becomes too distracted? Most of us are good at dealing with the wolf at the door, but it's never just a wolf, is it? There's always these rats gnawing at your ankles... Well, this is getting pretty long, but these are my thoughts on suspense, the "salt" of every good story. I hope you've picked up something you can use to "spice up" your own stories, and that it leads you to more success on your writing journey. I'm pretty sure everyone knows these things at some instinctive level, but seeing them written out may bring something you can run with into sharp focus. I hope so, and it's my pleasure to do it. You guys are the best! Stay inspired, Taylor... |
| Good day, everyone. I'm back in action after my wife's stint at the hospital. She was in for a week, but is fine now. She returned home last night, and now that I don't have to spend my days at her bedside, I'm ready to dive back in... Or I will be once I beat down this mountain of put-off chores around here. One thing I did manage to get done was to present the "Jack's Diamonds" Award to "The Last Goodbye" , a moving romantic tragedy that moved even my cold, goblin-loving heart to tears. Very much worth a read. I also posted one of my old stories just to keep my foot in the door, so feel free to enjoy "Death of a Clown" .Okay, so let me clear some of these chores, and I can get back in harness with reviews and stories and better posts on this blog. Meanwhile, best of luck to everyone on your writing journeys, and once again, our thanks to you for the good wishes and prayers that so buoyed Bonnie during her hospital stay. As I may have mentioned before, you guys are the best! Stay inspired, Taylor...  |
"You can always write something. You write limericks. You write a love letter. You do something to get you in the habit of writing again, to bring back the desire." ~ ERSKINE CALDWELL Good day once again, friends and readers. Another relevant quote gets me going, and I'm continuing my monologue about no longer being a writer. Bored yet? I know I am. What I'd like to be writing about is my latest writing triumph, but here we are. So instead, I have come to talk about my latest effort to whip this dead horse back to life. Buckle up. If you spend any time at all here, you have likely seen the ad for the Storymatic card system. This currently retails for $37.95 on Amazon and consists of two decks of 270 cards each. One deck describes a person by trait, and the other gives a situation. Well, as luck and a supportive family would have it, I was gifted this some time ago. It comes with a booklet describing various ways to use it, but none of them have worked for me thus far. Not much of a follower, I guess. But I recently made up another method that feels like it might lead somewhere, and I'm going to share it here. This should work with Storymatic or any similar prompt-provider. What I've done is to randomly select one "person" card, then select five "situation" cards, and pair the person up with any or all of the situations as they appear to fit. The first set I picked was as follows: The person card read, "A superstitious person." The situations were, "Wrong number; Third day without sleep; Equipment malfunction; No place to hide," and "A fever." The two I went with were Equipment malfunction and No place to hide. They've led me down a convoluted road to another chiller story that feels suitable for the "Invalid Item" anthology. Now, all I have to do is write it, and that has been where the wheels have come off of every attempt since 2020. Hope, as they say, springs eternal. I'll let you know if anything develops... Who am I kidding, you'll be able to hear my celebration from the other side of the country!In other news, I've been toying with the idea of starting a forum where practitioners of the dark and dangerous can meet to discuss the Craft of writing the chiller. It's under construction in my port. It's currently marked Private, so don't stampede over there. I bring it up here because I want to get some opinions. Would it be of interest? Would it duplicate other efforts currently being made on the site? Would it have value to writers currently working in the dark genres? If there are other items on the site already dealing in similar activities, please, I implore you, send me a link. If there's something already ongoing I can sign up for, that seems much more productive than starting from scratch, building an audience, defining a theme and all the follow-on activity that goes with that. And, you guys? The best of luck with all your projects, and may you avoid the dreaded Block for as long as you have ideas to develop. Stay inspired! Taylor... |
"Nature fits all her children with something to do. He who would write and can't write can surely review." ~ JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL Confession time; I'm 76 years old. Well, no crime in that, I guess, though some youngsters would have you believe otherwise, but no, I speak of the things lost over all those long decades, the good, the bad, and the... confusing. Things that no one wants to lose, but no choice is offered. Like most of you of mature years, I have gone through many hobbies. I built plastic models; planes, ships, cars, tanks, all were fair game. I still remember my first model. I was about six, and it was a B-52, a fairly new aircraft in the mid-1950s. It probably had less than ten parts — looked like something you might find in a cereal box — and I managed to butcher it in ways you would expect from a six-year-old, but I was hooked. From the fifties well into the eighties, I made hundreds of them. The last was a pretty large scale model of an F-14D from VF-84, the one with the skull & bones emblem on the tail. It was presented on a flight deck waiting for launch, canopy open, pilot and RIO awaiting their turn on the catapult. My son, who loved the Tomcat, was the pilot, and I was the RIO, our names painstakingly emblazoned below the cockpit. I couldn't quite finish it, as I woke up one morning and couldn't stand to look at parts, decals, paints, glue, none of it, for another day. It was over quite unexpectedly, and I've never picked up another one. Another big hobby was wargaming. If you aren't familiar, the board is a map of the area where a historical battle took place and the pieces are cardboard chits printed with information that represent the units present at the fight. I received Gettysburg for my 13th birthday, and spent the next thirty years leading armies across every locale on the planet, and a good number of off-world confrontations. I remember it was exactly thirty years, because I was about to begin my fourth decade when the interest turned off like throwing a switch. I've collected stamps, I've been an off-roader, a martial artist and a dozen other things, all of which faded from interest and became former hobbies. But there was one love that, through it all, excited, comforted, and uplifted me: writing. I began in grade school. For our non-American friends who use a different system, I was about ten. I wrote the sort of drivel you would expect from a 10-year-old boy, stories of me and my childhood friends defending the neighborhood from a Russian invasion or an infestation of live dinosaurs. Hopeless twaddle, but every journey begins with the first step. Over the years, as hobby after hobby came and went, as children, then grandchildren came, grew, and began their own lives, as my career developed, peaked, and slid gracefully into retirement, writing was there, ever-present, ever-exciting, always taking me on journeys to new worlds and new situations. Always, until about five years ago, when it unexpectedly became a chore. I sit down at my desk, spread out my materials, and instead of pitching into the next exciting project, I spend the allotted time like I'm trapped in a dead-end job, watching the clock and wishing it was over. I find that I do that less and less anymore. That, in a paragraph, is the reason I came back here. I was a writer for about 60 years, and then I wasn't. I came back in the hope that rubbing shoulders with all you fine writers would reinspire me. I had hopes that reading your stories in sufficient detail to provide the sort of reviews I write would reinspire me. But so far, nothing. I still have what seem to be, at least, "great" ideas. They develop in my mind while I'm doing dishes or vacuuming, but they all fall apart when I sit down to put them on the page. There's suddenly nothing. So I write reviews and occasionally blog. Hopefully what I offer in my reviews is helpful to someone. I never mean any harm, and if you don't like what I tell you, don't take it personally; it's never meant that way. As to blogging, that's a question that nags at me. When you look at me, you are looking at sixty years of experience by a writer who has passed through multiple styles and genres, self-published, appeared in anthologies, and developed a small but appreciative following — in a genre I don't write in any more — and has learned a lifetime of lessons about the Craft. This immediately makes me think I can post articles about how to write, and what certain genres look for, that sort of thing. Teaching a writing course for the new writers among us, in other words. But then I have to ask, what can I teach you about writing other than how to labor in obscurity for a lifetime. I've probably sold a couple of hundred books since my first offering in 2013. I just got my W2 from Amazon; I made $23 in royalties last year. So, what am I going to teach you about writing other than what not to do? And that brings me to now. I am gradually posting old works, chapter by chapter, and I hope that you enjoy them, but so far no fire has been relighted. So I will continue to review and occasionally offer a blog post about something that has caught my interest, and I hope that will be enough for now. It seems to be enough for me... Stay inspired, Taylor... |
For forty-odd years in this noble profession I've harbored a guilt, and my conscience is smitten. So here is my slightly embarrassed confession— I don't like to write, but I love having written. ~ MICHAEL KANIN Good morning, friends and followers, and I hope it finds you well. It finds me in a sharing mood, and that's why I'm here. I realize it isn't "Phriday," but I got words. Make of them what you will... I have mentioned in a number of places that I used to write a lot, I've enjoyed some minor success that never grew into anything really meaningful, and that I haven't written anything original in years. This is all true. I've been aware of writing.com for a good many years, and know that there are an awful lot of good stories here that can't be found anywhere else. So I joined under my handle, the Phantom Reviewer, to read, enjoy, and attempt to impart some of the lessons I've learned over a lifetime of writing to folks not as far along the path that they might be able to use to take their writing to new heights. This has, by and large, worked out well. I have indeed read some wonderful stories that can't be found anywhere else and made a few friends in the process, but I had an ulterior motive. I had hoped that daily exposure to all the fine works I was sure to encounter here would inspire me to return to the page. That, alas, hasn't worked out so well. Allow me to explain... During my "heyday," when I was younger and believed that I was God's gift to writing, I used to love to write. I couldn't wait for a spare hour in my busy day that I could fill with words on the page, and when I couldn't write, I was constantly making notes about what I would write the next time I got to my desk. I retired almost nine years ago, and was looking forward to all the stories I would be able to write with the 12+ hours of free time I would have every day. But, as so often happens, the reality didn't match the dream. Perhaps I overdid it at the beginning and burned myself out. Whatever the reason, I no longer find writing interesting. I have a little checkbook-size calendar where I write everything from household chores to doctor appointments to when to reload my phone; I'll forget if I don't! And clear mornings always say "review." When the workload is minimal and I have a block of hours, I mark in big letters, "WRITE." But as those days approach I find myself consumed with a sense of dread, like it's some horrible chore I have to do, like mucking out the septic tank or something. I get out my materials and try to produce something, but it's like being at a boring job and watching the clock, praying for it to be over. This saddens me. I have been a writer at one level or another for as long as I can remember, and I don't want to not be one, but this is the reality I must live with. I am currently parceling out old books and stories that I've written before, and I hope you find them worthy, but nothing new has come from the old pen in a while. I will continue to schedule these writing sessions and continue to hope that I catch the bug again, but if it isn't to be, know that I will keep active as a reviewer and a blogger, once I retitle this particular endeavor. Shortly I will reboot this and prattle on about this and that whenever the mood strikes me. Reviewing will continue apace. And writing? Well, let's just say, fingers crossed, and let it go at that. Have a productive week, and I'll see you around the stacks! Stay inspired, Taylor... |
"When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation." ~ Jorge Luis Borges You read it right, I'm putting the Philosopher to bed for a while. I spend several hours each week rustling up an idea for a post, cobbling it together, formatting and posting, then watching the mail for a taker. They are few and far between, and of late, I've become mindful of the Law of Diminishing Returns. I've been blocked for years and one of the things I hope to accomplish here at WdC is to reclaim the magic of writing stories again. It seems that until I'm able to do that, blogging is a waste of my chief resource: Time. So until new stories start hitting the page, the blog will have to wait. Like my kids used to say, it's been fun, but I've got to run. I'll still be lurking around with near-daily reviews, so it isn't like we won't be seeing each other. Stay inspired, Taylor... |
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