When everything falls apart, what holds us together? What keeps us going, and helps us to become whole again? Set your timer for ten minutes and write about a time when your world shattered, and how you came out the other side. Look at the characters in your novel. Is there any way the lesson you learned can help one of them? Posted by Khadijah Lacina

Ooh, a storm is threatening/My very life today/If I don't get some shelter/Ooh yeah I'm gonna fade away Clearly the Rolling Stones have not faded away, but their lyrics strike a chord within all of us. Whether the storm is within us or occurs due to a force of nature, we all face upheaval and difficulty, as do our characters. What storm your character has to face is most crucial to their development and the development of your story? How are you going to help them find the shelter they need to weather it? Posted by Khadijah Lacina

We've all had the experience of wishing we had said something to someone but did not for any of a number of reasons. Dig deeper into the relationship between two of your characters, or between your character and someone who is not directly in your novel but who influenced them at some point. Set your timer for fifteen minutes and write a letter that says what your character wishes he or she had said, but never did. Posted by Khadijah Lacina

Just like a river, each thread of our lives has a starting point. Choose one crucial decision your character has to make and trace it back to its beginning. Sometimes finding the beginning of something helps us to reach its end. Alternately, think bridges. How can your character make the transition from the point he or she is at now, to where you need him to be next? Posted by Khadijah Lacina

I once read a free Kindle book that purported to be a novel about a woman who is kidnapped by some vaguely Middle Eastern ruffian and taken back to their homeland. There is she taken under the wing of a strong local woman who eventually helps her to return to her home. I know that there are very good books being self-published, but this one did not fit into that category. The oddly named characters (an Arab name that translated to “zucchini,” for example), the blatant stereotyping, and the clunky use of odd spelling and word order to denote a foreign language were distracting, but the book did not become laughable until the author attempted to portray the protagonist walking around in African/Middle Eastern garb. It was painfully obvious that the writer had no idea not only what the clothing should consist of, but what it would be like to move around and function in it on a daily basis. Being a Muslim woman who wears Islamic clothing when I go out, the deficiencies in the book ...

I was not sure what to expect when I opened this book. The title, The Erotica Book Club for Nice Ladies , was intriguing, and from reading the back and blurbs I knew it contained two of my favorite things: herbs and mystery! Whether or not it would live up to its promise was a big unknown. Thankfully, it did. One of the things I enjoyed most was Spittler's main characters - the three founding members of The Erotica Book Club for Nice Ladies. They were vibrant, fresh, and engaging, and I liked seeing how each one's personal story interconnected with the others and how they developed individually as well as as friends. The mystery surrounding the book was entertaining and well-developed. Spittler's method of bringing in small glimpses of what was going on with other characters at the end of each chapter, and her tying it all in with Chaos Theory was well done and interesting. An additional boon is that I have added some new to me books that were mentioned in this one...

It seemed straightfoward enough. Live life. Write life. But the reality has turned out to be very different. First of all, there are the many ways to tell a story. I picture early storytellers sitting around campfires after all the day’s work was done, telling of the bear they saw while gathering berries, the old man they met up by the cave on the hill, the lightning that frightened their babies in the middle of the night. Stories with gestures, actions, and, at some point, words. Next, I would guess, would be poetry. Condensing experiences into words that ebbed and flowed and had meanings beyond the obvious. This would naturally lead to song, ballads of deeds great and small, carried from town to town in the hearts and minds of travelling bards. Writing, of course, came along at some point, and made the lives of storytellers both easier and harder; they could remember and tell stories the same way every time, and share them more widely, yet the written word is so final, so ...

Looking outside my window I see a lovely field, sundappled and windblown. The goats are browsing along its edge, wishing, I bet, for the fresh leaves they remember from summer. The children are working on a playhouse outside, the dogs running and barking, hoping to entice them to play. The gardens are mulched now, and I know that come Spring we will be harvesting rocks for days before we can plant a single seed. The Ozarks are beautiful, with a surface abundance that belies their rock and clay skeleton. A wild, beautiful place that reminds me of another land that I loved and called home for almost ten years. I once saw an optical illusion, where if you looked at a drawing a certain way it looked like a young woman, but from another angle it appeared to be an elderly one. Yemen is like that, the old and the new juxtaposed, shifting, always giving a glimpse of one when you are looking at the other. I found this especially to be true in the villages, where life goes on in the same ...