Laurel Garver's Blog, page 25

New tool for sound-alikes

It's phonics Friday, and because I'm currently down with an ice-slipping injury, I'm keeping it short today. Instead of doing my usual homophone clarity session, I thought I'd give a shout out for a book series I recently discovered, Homonyms and Confusing Words by Lisa Binion.

I know, I know, Binion is using the wrong word to describe this book. A homonym is a same name, like "beat," meaning whip and also territory. She really should have used homophone, meaning same sound, like "beat" and "b...

Inner pain and the myth of "safety"

Many of us have suffered great difficulties and hardships, and as a result we've developed an internal organ for processing pain I call The Inner Fist. The Inner Fist clamps around that set of hurts and keeps it "safe"--unprodded, airless, always raw.
image: wikimedia commons
When anything comes at us that feels like the clenched pain--rejection, violation, terror and the like--the Inner Fist hits back. When it hits inside, it punches holes in our confidence, pummels our joy, hammers home the t...

Traits on parade: Why I can't stop watching 24 hours of "Happy"

When I first heard about Pharrell Williams's 24-hour long video of his hit song "Happy" I thought it sounded like a unique, new form of torture. This went way beyond earworms.

Boy was I surprised.

Opening image from the videoThe video is one continuous shot of one person or small group after another lip synching to Williams's song as they move/dance through various locations in and around Los Angeles. Williams himself appears once an hour on the hour, for 24 appearances. In between, if I've don...

Refined by fire

While doing a filing cabinet purge, I came across a year-in-review letter from one of the most difficult years of my adult life, 1993. I was a young, post-college girl in my first job as a reporter and editor on a trade publication for the natural gas industry. Go ahead. Laugh. The third grader inside is surely thinking about beans and bodily processes, not drilling, pipelines and seasonal fuel price spikes.

This particular year, I experienced in a somewhat literal way the effects of being "re...

Insta-aww and still more creative first meets (avoiding insta-love 3)

In my previous posts in this mini-series, I discussed why insta-love is an ineffective way to build a romance plot, and suggested some alternate first-meet reactions other than immediate true love.

Today I'd like to append that list with three more creative first-meets to add to your romance toolbox.

Insta-awww image: www.prevention.com
In the novel Eleanor and Park, Rainbow Rowell sets the scene of schoolbus heirarchy, and the hero Park's tenuous position within it. She then introduces Eleanor a...

Insta-ugh and other creative first-meets (avoiding insta-love 2)

Photo credit: jpkwitter from morguefile.comFirst impressions can be powerful, but having a character go from never-seen-you-before stranger to die-for-you, head-over-heels, true love in under sixty seconds isn't terribly realistic. Nor is it the most effective way to build a romantic plot line. There's too little room for escalation, for change and growth.

One instance where Insta-love can be effectively used is when the character's fatal flaw is being naively trusting and...

Anxiety of Influence

As a writer, should you be especially careful about what you read?

It's a question that's been plaguing me recently, as my reading binge continues (thanks to a respiratory infection I can't seem to shake that leaves me with little energy for much else). My current read isn't an identical scenario to the one I'm currently writing, but there are numerous points of intersection. This puts me in a bit of a quandary. Will continuing to read help me work out my own story, of will it derail me?
Photo...

Avoiding insta-love part 1

During my blogging hiatus, I went on a big reading binge, gobbling up six books in under three weeks. I largely was catching up on recommendations and newer books by favorite authors including: Catching Fire (Suzanne Collins), Where She Went (Gayle Forman), Code Name Verity (Elizabeth Wein), The Story of Us (Deb Caletti), Eleanor and Park (Rainbow Rowell), and The Future of Us (Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler).

image by paulabflat, morguefile.comThese books had some love triangles, some shaken l...

Back in the saddle

Photo credit: cesstrelle from morguefile.comReflecting on the state of blogging over the past year, I've seen an unprecedented number of blogging friends abandon their blogs in 2013. They've fled to other platforms, or are focusing on other things.

I'm finding it harder and harder to stay motivated to post. Thanks to Twitter, my posts are garnering more hits than ever, but interaction? Well, that seems like a thing of the past.

 Because of that trend, I did a redesign last f...

Herrings That Don't Stink: with Hart Johnson

Thank you, Laurel, for hosting me!

 I tend to be a bit of a goofball, so it may have escaped those of you who know me that I know some stuff. Writing mysteries has some tricks to it... which is GOOD, as the GOAL with genre mystery is to both give your reader everything they need to solve the mystery AND not make it too easy to solve—keep them guessing up until the end, but in such a way that they look back and think I SHOULD HAVE SEEN THAT!
 
One of the primary tools of this mission i...