Lily Iona MacKenzie's Blog, page 38
September 10, 2018
Writers Or Magicians?
Fiction writers have been called many things, but magician seems to me the best description. They dip into the black hat of their imagination and produce an endless variety of characters, situations, images, genres, events, and styles. The effect on readers is nothing less than magical, the reader also becoming a magician, assisting in making […]
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August 20, 2018
Giving Birth to a Novel and to Myself
The publishing date for Freefall: A Divine Comedy draws nearer (1/1/19), and a few days ago, my advanced review copies (ARCs) arrived after the drafts went through several final editings. Since the novel had already gone through numerous versions, the editing at the end was light, mainly copy-editing problems. But the road to this moment has […]
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August 13, 2018
Editing’s Many Layers, #AuthorToolboxBlogHop
Small presses don’t have the reputation that larger presses do of maintaining high editorial standards. But my experience with these presses, especially the one that published Curva Peligrosa, my second novel, has been revelatory. Before submitting the manuscript to the press for its consideration. I had been through it numerous times on my own, seeking […]
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August 6, 2018
Is Poetry as Necessary as Food?
As a poet, I recognize poetry’s tremendous importance to a society. Still, I can get caught up in the complexities of modern life: I have classes to teach, papers to read and grade, writing projects demanding equal attention, a family to care for. Therefore, it’s easy to forget that poetry is as necessary to our […]
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July 30, 2018
Reflections on How Poems Mean
I’m always a puzzled by how writers can plan out a poem or story before even attempting the first sentence. Some do complete outlines, right down to the actual ending. Others have ideas they want to develop into a poem or story, which suggests control over the content. To me, these methods feel too engineered, […]
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July 23, 2018
Poetry in Dreams (Part 2)
In my last post, “The Poetry in Dreams,” I promised to talk next time about how one “gets” a poem. Here is my attempt to deal with that topic. To understand either a dream or a poem, we need to develop a new faculty, a “third eye.” William Stafford has another way of saying this: […]
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July 17, 2018
The Poetry in Dreams
I’ve been thinking a good deal about dreams and the role they play in our lives. I’ve also been thinking about how they relate to poetry. In an expository writing class I was teaching, many students admitted having trouble reading poetry. I discussed this difficulty with them. “Why,” I asked, “in a class of twenty […]
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July 9, 2018
A Reader’ Evolution: How Annie Oakley & Wonder Woman taught me to read!
As a pre-TV child (television arrived in Calgary in the early 50s, about ten years after it appeared in the U.S.), radio dramas fed my imagination: Boston Blackie; Suspense Theatre; and The Green Hornet come immediately to mind. Though they provided the plot and dialogue, I was able to supply the images myself, far more […]
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July 2, 2018
“Be someone on whom nothing is lost.” —Henry James
Many writers try to live up to Henry James’ advice: “Be someone on whom nothing is lost.” We writers need to approach our internal and external realities in a mindful way, taking in as much as we can so that when we write description, create dialogue, and develop characters, we have plenty of material to […]
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June 25, 2018
Do Published Writers Need Media Kits & Sell Sheets?
Until a few months ago, I had no idea what a media kit or sell sheet was. They seemed like something only a publisher or publicist would need to create, not an author. In some cases, my assumption might be correct. But for those of us who are published by presses with limited marketing budgets, […]
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