Unsure of the proper sequence of titles, my wife recently referred to this latest entry as “The Bourne Redundancy.” Ha ha. But I have to admit, it’s not too far from the truth. The story of Jason Bourne, the ex-CIA assassin with no past — and, his ex-handlers hope, no future — has now […]
Crime writing by the rules
As a reader and part-time writer of crime fiction, I’m familiar enough with most of the rules of the genre — for example, your story had better have a corpse in it. But if you’d pressed me on it, I would have listed maybe five such rules. Turns out there are 20, at least […]
From Ian Fleming, with love
I suppose you have to be a certain age to have read a lot of Ian Fleming. I went through every one of his James Bond books as a teenager, starting with Dr. No when I was about 13. I found the sex and violence and diabolical plots so intoxicating that I quickly located […]
A good writing tool, and the price is right
While I’m trying to think of something better to write about, here’s another plug for OpenOffice.org, the freeware, open-source “productivity suite” that does pretty much everything Microsoft Office does at less than a fraction of the price. Since my new laptop came without much software installed (and what was installed I immediately deleted), OpenOffice.org […]
Beating the heat with ice-cold fiction
It’s another hot and muggy afternoon in Wichita, which got me thinking about books that feel cold. Not emotionally cold, necessarily, but evocative enough of snow and ice and winter wind to put a chill into even a stifling summer day in the Midwest. One of the chilliest books I’ve ever read is “Smilla’s […]
Dude, yer gettin’ a Dell — to write your book
A few weeks ago, I wrote that I was returning to the keyboard after a hiatus of too many months napping, reading, working out, doing crosswords, playing solitaire, drinking wine, mowing the lawn, surfing the Internet, cursing the cats, brooding through Wichita’s monsoon season — any and all of the hundreds of things writers […]
Sentences mightier than the sword. Sort of.
This year’s winning entry in the 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is a sobering reminder on the perils of handling dashes and subordinate clauses without parental supervision. It’s also quite funny: “Gerald began — but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else […]
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