Laurel Garver's Blog, page 24

B: Belly Good

by Marge Piercy (1936 —)

A heap of wheat, says the Song of Songs
but I've never seen wheat in a pile.
Apples, potatoes, cabbages, carrots
make lumpy stacks, but you are sleek
as a seal hauled out in the winter sun.
I can see you as a great goose egg
or a single juicy and fully ripe peach.
You swell like a natural grassy hill.
You are symmetrical as a Hopewell mound,
photo by Karpati Gabor, morguefile.comwith the eye of the navel wide open,
the eye of my apple, the pear's port
window. You're not...

A: An Almost Made Up Poem

by Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

Photo credit: alexfrance from morguefile.comI see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not...

Tips for Researching Your Story

by Sherrie Petersen

Photo credit: quicksandala from morguefile.com Research is one of my favorite things to do when I’m writing a new book. I can lose entire days trying to answer a simple question. (Do they have carpet or tile floors in the Deep Space Network at JPL? What type of food vendors do they have at the airport in Corpus Christi?) The internet has made searching for information FAR easier than it was for novelists even ten or fifteen years ago. But the internet is...

Upcoming awesome

It might seem like I've been neglecting this little corner of the Interwebs, but in fact, I've been gearing up for a solid month of awesomeness.

Here's what's in store:
Prepare for lift-off! (photo by earl53 from morguefile.com)
A fabulous guest post about researching your fiction from Sherrie Peterson. She'll  share a bit about her exciting new MG science fiction release WISH YOU WEREN'T and has a great giveaway also!

Twenty six days of all things cool in poetry including...
W...

A-Z Theme reveal

I'm a few days late to the theme reveal party for the A-Z blogging challenge, in part because I was hosting an actual party at my home this weekend for my daughter and her friends, Scandinavian themed. The girls watched Disney''s Frozen, ate Swedish meatballs and Danish, played Freeze Up and painted some Scandinavian-style wood cutouts. Decorations included Finnish paper stars and lots of spray snow. 

So, I love playing on a theme. But Scandinavia A-Z isn't quite up my alley (beyond lutef...

Just one of the guys: the magic of boy-girl friendship

When I read Melina Marchetta's Saving Francesca, it really resonated with me. What I especially liked was the way she develops non-romantic friendships between the teen guys and the girls who "invade" their once-all-boys school that goes co-ed.

photo by click, morguefile.comPerhaps it's because my nearest sibling is a brother that I had loads of guy friends all through school. Boys brought something cool and interesting to the table that many girls didn't.

In grade school, it was the boys...

"I want to join in, but...": another kind of blues

Every year, I toy with the idea of joining the A-Z blogging challenge, and I always talk myself out of it. It has the potential to be a huge time suck. But it's also a great way to make new connections, and I could use some of those. As part of my new year's housecleaning, I unfollowed seventy-some blogs I used to read that have gone inactive. That's a lot of lost connection.

April is also National Poetry Month, which would make it very, very easy to come up with a theme for posts. Poem a day,...

Howdy, 'allo, Yo: Five tips for researching dialect

My book in progress occurs largely in north central Pennsylvania, where I grew up. However, I've lived my entire adult life in Philadelphia, so I've forgotten some things, especially the dialect.

For a number of reasons, I never really embraced the local dialect in my rural hometown. My urbane older siblings mocked the "hick speak" whenever they visited. My parents are from Montana and Minnesota and their western and midwestern turns of phrase stuck with me far more than localisms. A few I rem...

Making the old new again

You hear it all the time in publishing: "we want fresh takes on what's familiar." What does that mean exactly? Readers want to be delightedly surprised, not left scratching their heads. In traditional publishing at least, there seems to be a pretty good formula for accomplishing this--take a standard plot and add a twist.

Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces gave us the monomyth--the hero's journey structure found is pretty much every adventure story from The Odyssey to Star Wars t...

Those elusive aha moments

Have you ever been struck at an odd time with a solution to a plot or character problem that's been niggling at you for weeks? I was actually awakened in the early morning by one of these kinds of "aha!" moments.

image: Camdiluv, wikimedia commonsI'd turned in some chapters to my crit group last week, hoping they could tell me what wasn't working in chapter 15. I was tired of staring at it, thinking something is not working, yet not being able to pinpoint it. This morning I woke with a jolt, r...