Timothy Miller's Blog, page 7

Are characters sharks?

 

I can't help it. I keep changing little things, adding little things to this manuscript, even as I present it to agents as a completed work. This is a little passage I added last night:

"How do you...how do you know you're not a character?"

"Oh, that's depressingly easy, my dear. Just look back on all those boring, meaningless moments, whole days that dragged away. Characters never experience that. They're sharks, always moving forward."

And I thought, hey, that's profound. But ... do I believe it...

Worlds end at the well

  I can't find it now. Maybe it never existed, or it was from somewhere else entirely. But I always associate the image with the Little Golden Book version of Walt Disney's Darby O'Gill and the Little People (from the Darby O'Gill tales by Herminie Templeton Kavanagh).

I must have been six or seven, just before I read The Wind in the Willows and was banished from the world of picture books entirely. I remember the image as the cover of the book, but it may have been a picture inside, or...

Carlos Labbe

 

"He'd been mistaken, he said to himself, as he sat back down at his desk: he didn't want to write a detective novel; he wanted to write a mystery." --Carlos Labbé

A Drood

 

After publishing three books without an agent, I've been hitting the cyber-pavement searching for a good one. They don't want snail mail submissions any more, oh, no (my first agent must have been the last one on earth to prefer paper) and half of them have abandoned email queries for query forms--very impersonal and efficient. One recent agent query form asked me what my dream as an author was, which I thought was an interesting question, one I hadn't thought about before. But I dec...

The labyrinthine page

"You can always edit a bad page.
But you can't edit a blank page."

    

      I've been seeing this quote on social media a lot lately, and it's true as far as it goes. But there are hazards involved with filling up a page, and they often go unexamined. Because every word choice constrains the next choice. "A" rather than "an" means that you have eliminated all words with a vowel in the choice of the following word. The word "I've" in at the head of my first sentence locked in the tense for the fo...

Target audience

 

The agent's query submission form asked who was the target audience for my book, so I answered:Mystery readers who don't mind reading in a mirror, romance readers brought up on cheap gin, suspense readers who like getting sidetracked."I mean, if you're going to be rejected anyway, you should have a little fun. Besides, it's true

KRL review of the Pharaoh's Heart

"The Strange Case of the Pharaoh’s Heart is a paranormal romp with Holmes and Watson, and a time warp to the well-researched 1920s, from glittering haunts of the rich to the tombs of the Valley of the Kings."

Read the entire review at KRL News and Reviews.

Age Limit

The Strange Case of the Pharaoh's Heart.

                                      Recommended for ages 6 to 600.

Raymond Chandler

[image error]A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong."--Raymond Chandler

A Minifesto

 [image error]

Call it a minifesto.
"With the rise of artificial intelligence, we've had to imagine a world in which AI replaces the human artist entirely. It's a theoretical day that we hope never comes to pass. Timothy Miller, author of The Strange Case of the Pharaoh's Heart, argues that dangerous threats to art do exist, and they don't stem entirely from AI, but from the audience itself. Read on for more."
Read the entire piece at Criminal Element.