Barbara Fradkin's Blog, page 40

Gatekeepers

 On Saturday I attended a book event that I, along with nine other authors, were invited to.  I generally don’t like to spend time at an all-day affair like this, but the organizers are good friends and have been supporters of mine since my first book was published.  Plus, I met some great people and got to know the other authors who attended.  I had a terrific time. Only one other author at the

Nuggets

Inspiration. Muse. Ideas. Call it what you will. But story nuggets, regardless of where you get yours, keep us going.I started out as a reporter at a daily newspaper and never lost my love of that world. To this day, I’m a news junky and get many story ideas from reading daily papers.A recent example came last month when I read this article. A local man made national news when a DNA match taken

Vicki Delany takes over Facebook

 Yesterday was a special day. My great friend, travel buddy, and writer extraordinaire threw a Facebook party to celebrate the release of her 50th book. 50th!!! Vicki is a former long-time member of Type M for Murder, and she has been variously described as "the queen of cosies", "a one-woman crime wave" and "the energizer bunny of mystery fiction". In her twenty-one years since publishing her

I'm Back

 Better late than next time. I've missed my last two Friday posts. With the last, I was returning from South Burlington, Vermont. Luck was on my side. The GPS worked, the ferry from Vermont to Essex, NY was on time, and the traffic was not as heavy coming toward Albany as it was headed north into the Adirondacks. But by the time I got settled and ready to write, it was after midnight and no

Learning How To Write

 by Sybil Johnson I’ve been making roman shades lately, replacing ones that are way too old and falling apart. I could have had a blinds company make new ones or even found a class on making them and taken it. Instead, I chose to do it myself, using as much of the old hardware and wood as possible. This is not my first rodeo making this type of shade. I’ve replaced seven other shades around the

Relatable Characters? Not This Time

�� I did a workshop at our local community college last week about drawing upon real life to write fiction.�� It���s a great subject because isn���t that what we do?�� Take our real-life details and put them into make-believe stories?While I talked about this, I mentioned how characters should be relatable, meaning they have to have good qualities, but they need flaws as well.�� Because, let���s face it,

Emotional Filters

 While we humans like to think of ourselves as highly evolved, coolly rational beings, we are in fact, emotional creatures. Every decision we make must leach through our emotional filters. Ultimately, we behave based on how we feel. We old-hands in this writer business teach about the importance of the emotional motivations and reactions in our characters, especially when writing fiction, but how

On being an Other

 Goodness, what a lot of wonderful stuff happened since I accidentally missed my last post! So much to comment on. I love all the talk about research and may tackle it next time. But today I'm going to pick apart the whole topic of appropriation of voice. It's different from book banning, which is ridiculous. There are some truly evil books out there, like Mein Kampf, but I think with proper

How Writing a Novel is Like Finding a Woolly Mammoth in Your Back Yard, or The Writer as Archeologist.

I adore Sybil's entry, below, on the joys and fascinations of the research an author does.A few years ago I read about a soybean farmer in Michigan who was digging around on his property when he found something that he thought was a buried fence post. He tried to dig it out, but discovered it was much bigger than a fence post, and attached to something. He kept digging, and lo and behold, after

Curious Me

 by Sybil JohnsonWriters are a curious bunch We see something we find interesting or we don’t understand, we look it up. I’m constantly finding stuff to investigate, partly because it’s fun and partly because you never know what might spark an idea for a story. Here’s what I’ve been looking into recently: Exterior doors in Finland - I’ve watched a lot of Finnish/Norwegian/Swedish crime dramas