Barbara Fradkin's Blog, page 9

A.I.--the Digital Poltergeist

 by Thomas KiesLast week Artificial Intelligence snuck like a digital poltergeist into our writing critique group. About eight of us have been meeting every Tuesday for months and I’ve enjoyed it tremendously.  The group helped me finish my last manuscript.Most of the participants are former students of mine and their writing skills continue to grow.  Many of them are working

Get Your Focus On

Life is distracting. There are the two-hundred television streaming options. There are the 51 million YouTube channels. (not hyperbole. I looked it up!) There are also 75-thousand Substack newsletters. Emails. Text messages. Social media doomscrolling you perhaps engage in at two in the morning when your cortisol levels don’t let you sleep.How can we gather all this chatter, rustle it into a pen,

Creating Characters

 by Sybil JohnsonCreating characters for stories is both fun and challenging. I worry sometimes that the ones I’ve created are too much alike, that readers won’t be able to distinguish between them. Or find them boring or unbelievable or... I’m always thinking about different ways to create characters that will produce different personalities. These 2 books have been helpful to me: Getting

Sorting the Sites

 by Charlotte HingerBarbara Fradkin a long time of Type M' recently shared all of her frustrations with social media in a post entitled Social Media Self Destructionn. She captured my feelings so accurately that I can't help drawing attention to all that she said. Right now I'm sorting through a number of sites to decide which ones I want to continue and which I should abandon. My

Have you ever been to a murder?

   Type M For Murder, right? So let's talk about one, a real life experience that looked like a murder but that turned out to be a natural death. A DFO as they term it. Done Fell Over.   This is a true story.    I was in a ride-along with an El Paso County Sheriff. I was taking the Sheriff's Citizens' Academy. We had presentations from K9, patrol, detectives,

Peonies and Pine Pollen

by Catherine DiltsWarmer weather is finally here on the eastern slopes of theRocky Mountains. It’s not uncommon for us to receive snow in the summer months.Hail plagues us in any month.My gardening friends are greedily enjoying their flowers.You dare not hesitate. Stop and smell the roses! A hail storm or freak freezecould take them out without warning.I hesitate to experiment with

Using Substack for an Author Newsletter

The cover image from my recent author newsletter on JOY.Happy Friday, Type Ms! It's Shelley, and I'm going to share a little bit about writing and managing a Substack newsletter. I really think of my newsletter as a complete publication, not a blog post. That is why I have several sections in each one. These include an editorial letter, a bit about the art, the month’s long-form essay,

What is "Real"?

 For the past some months I've been working on two books at a time. I'm having fun going back and forth, but I've discovered it's not the most efficient way to get either book finished in a reasonable amount of time.The two books are very different from one another. One is a contemporary mystery, the other is historical with mystery elements. But both have touches of magical realism – the

People Watching and Persistence

 by Sybil JohnsonPeople watching and persistence. I’ll call them the 2 Ps. They are both important for writers. One of them gives us ideas for stories. The other makes us keep on going through the ups and downs of the writing life.  I enjoy people watching whether it’s at Disneyland or at the airport or anywhere else. I have a Magic Key pass so I go to Disneyland around 8 times a year.

Technically Blue

by Charlotte Hinger Oh yeah? Just try spending a whole night and the rest of the next morning trying to print the right Amazon label. I have a single very old hardcover book that I peddle through Amazon's Vendor Central program. It's Come Spring, the first book I published. It's almost forty years old. I foolishly bought a lot of inventory when Simon & Schuster fired my editor