Deborah Adams's Blog, page 12

Jamie Lisa Forbes – 3 Questions & a Cover

How much of your own personality do you share with your characters? Is that a choice, or does it happen on its own?

Consciously at least, I try to keep my personality out of my characters. I am most concerned with authentic characterization, so with every character, I try to place myself in their shoes and I try to see the world as I imagine they would view it. That is true even of secondary characters. For example, to develop the character, Eleanor, in Sunny Gale, I did a fair amount of ...

Moon: Pathways, or the argument for circular storytelling

This is a repost of Julie Herman‘s most recent b.read.crumbs post.

In the labyrinth of a difficult text, we find unmarked forks in the path, detours, blind alleys, loops that deliver us back to our point of entry, and finally the monster who whispers an unintelligible truth in our ears.   — Mason Cooley

Not withstanding the fact that all of the photos in the banner above are daylight, I would like to point out our tagline: what is a path, really? For the Moon card always shows us a...

Ray Zimmerman – 3 Questions & a Cover

A short interview wherein one of my favorite authors answers three questions about the writing life.

Question 1: What’s your Go-To source when you need inspiration?

Inspiration comes in short bursts, and I write short pieces. These include poems, freelance journalism, and occasional short stories and essays.

Writing is a two-stage process because the natural world inspires much of my writing. I begin by getting notes on paper, which may occur while watching birds or examining the fl...

Oh No He Didn’t! Brilliant Women and the Men Who Took Credit for Their Work

by Wendy J. Murphy, JD

Plagiarism is a very serious transgression; even a minor infraction, such as failing to include a citation in an academic paper, is cause for termination from employment or expulsion from college. 

The stories in my book involve far more serious plagiarism of women’s work, yet in almost every case, nothing was done. Even the men who openly boasted about taking credit for women’s work suffered no consequences.

Take, for example, Rosalind Franklin. Rosalind was a br...

b.read.crumbs : Twinkling

star ~ noun -  a natural luminous body visible in the sky; a person who is preeminent in a particular field 

A few months ago I wrote a b.read.crumbs post about tarot Key 9, The Hermit, in which I shared a few hermit crab flash pieces.

The image I used for that post is a Hermit card from one of my small collection of Tarot decks, but I want you to see a more traditional Hermit, so here’s that:

Did you notice that the lantern’s light is a star? It’s a star that illuminates the He...

b.read.crumbs : Revealing

The traditional meaning of the major arcana tarot card The Devil is bondage, enslaved by the material world, addiction to physical pleasures. The White Light Tarot deck places this card within the realm of the root chakra, which is very similar to Maslow’s foundation tier; both are all about security, safety, feeling that we have a place in the world–or about the fear that comes from a lack of balance in this area.

One of my go-to books about Tarot is Spiritual Tarot: Seventy-Eight Pa...

Joanna Grisham ~ 3 Questions & a Poem

3 Questions and a Poem–in which one of my favorite poets is interviewed and shares a poem.

Question 1

What do you consider the three most important elements of a poem?

There are so many possible answers to this question, and my answer will probably be different if you ask me again a year from now, but today I think the most important elements of a poem are imagery, emotion, and the unexpected, and these three things all reinforce each other, of course. First, poems must have vivid image...

Kerry Fryar Freeman – 3 Questions & a Cover

A short interview wherein one of my favorite authors answers three questions about the writing life.

What’s the hardest scene you’ve ever written?

The hardest ended up being one of my favorite scenes in SEDONA. It was Drunk Tommy’s background chapter because up until that point, I didn’t like him at all, and it was early. However, I’ll tell you a little secret…that scene was actually later in the book but during rewrites it got moved earlier but one of my editors thought it would h...

b.read.crumbs : Transforming

trans·for·ma·tion/ˌtran(t)sfərˈmāSH(ə)n/ : a complete change in the appearance or character of something or someone, especially so that that thing or person is improved

Tarot key XIII, usually called Death, is the card those television and movie fortunetellers always manage to turn with a great flourish and gasp of horror. That’s fiction. This card almost never means physical death. Almost never.

What we’re talking about here is Transformation, people. Change, alteration, conversio...

b.read.crumbs: Hanging Out

This is a repost of Julie Herman‘s most recent b.read.crumbs post.

The following definition of HANG from Merriam Websiter online is the one folks usually think applies when they get the hanged man. 

He hanged for his crimes. To be suspended from the neck until dead as punishment for real or imagined crimes.

I invite you to look carefully at the image. Are any of the beings depicted on these cards hanging until dead? 

I think not.

So I invite you to connect to one of the ot...