Victoria Janssen's Blog, page 105

Isaac Rosenberg, "Break of Day in the Trenches"

Break of Day in the TrenchesThe darkness crumbles away.It is the same old druid Time as ever,Only a live thing leaps my hand,A queer sardonic rat,As I pull the parapet's poppyTo stick behind my ear.Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knewYour cosmopolitan sympathies.Now you have touched this English handYou will do the same to a GermanSoon, no doubt, if it be your pleasureTo cross the

Excerpt from A War Nurse's Diary: The Tale of Ragtime

The following is an excerpt from A War Nurse's Diary: Sketches from a Belgian Field Hospital, published 1918 and now in the public domain.There's a whole novel in this story.#That reminds me of "Ragtime." I must tell you about him. His real name was de Rasquinet, but, when written hastily on a chart, it looked like ragtime, and was easier to pronounce. People who do not like medical details had

Explicit, Implicit, or Somewhere in Between? - Janet Mullany Guest Post

Please welcome my guest, Janet Mullany!#Explicit, Implicit, or Somewhere in Between?Now and again (oh, I lie. I Google myself all the time) I come across a reference to my first Regency chicklit, The Rules of Gentility (HarperCollins, 2007), as a book that "has no sex in it."Unfailingly it makes me laugh because the book is full of sex. What the book doesn't have is explicit language describing

Basics of the Western

So, Westerns. What are the basic elements of a Western? There are the two plots: 1) a stranger comes to town and 2) someone leaves town, heading for a new place. A subsidiary plot involves surviving in the wilderness, whether that's physical (making a go of a farm or ranch) or emotional (surviving in a corrupt town) - both come under the category of Civilization versus Wilderness. And,

Alleys and Doorways Print Edition

A while back, my friend Meredith Schwartz edited an electronic anthology titled Alleys and Doorways: Stories of Queer Urban Fantasy for Torguere Press, and I agreed to write an Elspeth Potter story for it. I started that story over twice and eventually abandoned my initial attempt and wrote something completely different in a very limited time period, so it was an interesting experience for

Realism in Fantasy (Sex) - Cecilia Tan Guest Post

Please welcome back my guest, Cecilia Tan!#I like the fantastic. I like magic and surrealism and being transported to another world by a book. And as anyone who has read pretty much anything I've written knows, I like to mix magic, surrealism, and escape with eroticism. But there reaches a point where if the sex itself is too "airy fairy," if the Vaseline is smeared on the lens too thick, that it

Paragraphing

I didn't really start thinking about paragraphing - consciously - until a couple of years ago.My writers' workshop was critiquing one of my pieces. I don't remember if it was a short story or a novel, or even exactly when the meeting took place. But I clearly remember John pointing out that I'd "stepped on my own ending." He'd made this comment before, I think, to someone else at a different

Siegfried Sassoon, "Joy-Bells"

Joy-BellsRing your sweet bells; but let them be farewells To the green-vista'd gladness of the past That changed us into soldiers; swing your bells To a joyful chime; but let it be the last. What means this metal in windy belfries hung When guns are all our need? Dissolve these bells Whose tones are tuned for peace: with martial tongue Let them cry doom and storm the sun

What Happens in the Reader's Mind

"A writer's talking about what he or she is capable of, like a writer's talking about the worth of his or her own work, is a pretty good way for that writer to start sounding like a pompous poseur. Above all things, the story, the poem, the text is -- and is only -- what its words make happen in the reader's mind. And all readers are not the same. Any reader has the right to say of any text: "But

Origin Stories - Katrina Williams

Please welcome my guest, Katrina Williams!#I began to write seriously in the tenth grade, but like all teenagers, would have benefited from looking up "seriously" in the dictionary, despite using the word on a frequent basis. I was convinced I would be a writer one day and majored in English Lit to prepare, but life soon beat me down to the point where I put writing away. Forever. Too impractical