By AB Plum Here goes another rant on a social phenomenon I dislike more than back-to-back TV commercials or politicians who lie to the public or the constant pop-up ads on Google, FB, AOL and everywhere else on the Internet. Smart phones go to the top of my Bleh List every time. Smart phones are […]
By AB Plum The picture of a woman with forefinger to her lips greets me as I enter Cedar Crest Nursing Facility. Rays of sunshine slant through the dim reception area. A woman at the desk whispers for me to sign in. Behind her is a duplicate picture of the shusher at the front door. […]
By AB Plum Expecting Kay Kendall’s byline? Kay’s on hiatus this week, and I’m subbing. Years ago (after we stopped chiseling words of wisdom in stone and around the invention of the printing press), I wrote a full page of “high school-news” every week for my daily newspaper. Like Hemingway and others, I created on […]
By AB Plum Do you skim prologues? Dislike them? Shrug when you finish and begin Chapter 1 (the real story)? Feel “manipulated” when you finish the book? Prologues stir up a lot of discussion among writers and readers. Personally, I like them if they’re more than hype. Winding up a seven-book series, I decided to […]
By AB Plum On April 30, I’ll upload to Amazon The Whole Truth. TWT is the final—seventh—volume of The MisFit Series, dark psychological thrillers about a psychopath’s impact on innocents he meets along his twisted journey. After seven books, two thousand pages, and half a million words, this has been a tough story-telling experience. I am glad […]
Last month I invited 8 authors to dinner. Fun, exciting, and exasperating. Exasperating because my guests reminded me of how little I read these days. In years past, I read at least a book a week. Somewhere, I’ve lost the time to do that. I now read—most frequently—in bed. Too often I fall asleep. Not […]
By AB Plum Sorry, Facebook. Despite your recent pronouncements that longer posts engage people at a deeper level, nothing beats face-to-face conversations. Sorry, Twitter. Good conversation requires more than 280 characters. These heresies lead me to think about people I’d like to talk to at a dinner party. Politicians, celebrities, and sports figures don’t get invites. […]
By AB Plum With the advent of a new year, who better to paraphrase than the Bard himself? Promoting is much on my mind in these early days of 2018. I haven’t yet finished my 2018 Marketing Plan. Part of me hates, loathes, and cannot stand having to spend writing time on finding reviews, placing […]
By AB Plum Still waiting for the winner of my November giveaway to contact me with names for two characters in my next novel, Broken-Hearted Many. In case I don’t hear before blog deadline, I’ll ponder a bit on one of my favorite topics: Naming characters. Feller Gowdy is a name I hope to use […]
By AB Plum Thanksgiving is always a tough subject for me. Both my parents died—twenty years apart—on the holiday. A good friend also died in between that timeframe. I was an adult, but roasting turkey can still stir up some tough memories. Sometimes all the food porn in every magazine out there gives me a […]