A Novel Idea

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said. Peter Drucker Right about now, the hubster and eight of our friends are savoring a gourmet meal on the North Shore of Lake Superior as wild waves hit the rocks only yards from a cozy lamplit condo.  I’m thinking on and off [...]

Here, as promised, are the top twenty writing rules, cited by SCBWI keynoter, Jane Yolen, author of 300 books in virtually every genre, and condensed by yours truly: Eschew the exclamation point.  (Just think, it’s her #1 rule!!!!!!!) Go easy on the adverbs.  (She noted that J.K. Rowling is admittedly, grandly, justifiably the exception.) Don’t [...]

Decades ago, a funny woman named Lin Oliver came to Denver, where I was living at the time, and gave a group of us the skinny on a new writer’s organization she and a handful of other writers had just created in California.  Convinced there was a need for such a support group, she went [...]

Just spent the last few days at the conference of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators with well over a thousand other participants from 25 countries and 45 states.  A few days before departure for New York, a good friend, who is a businesswoman and extrovert, suggested I attend as Someone Else. She [...]