THE LOVE SCENE Ah, February—the season of the Valentine.  When all thoughts turn to love (or lust!). But with books and stories, we almost always have a “valentine” moment.  No matter in which genre you’re writing, a love scene is almost always included, be it Thriller or Mystery, Fantasy (good grief but vampires seem to have nothing else to do!), Mainstream, etc., etc., at some point our hero gets a breather from his travails and is rewarded by some physical love. And, by golly, most of the time he deserves it! Or should—if not, you may have missed a critical element in your storyline and character development. I’m not talking erotica or the graphic sex of Urban Lit, but in just about every other story genre we still need some love. And we don’t have to write actual “sex” either. Until the past decade and a half or so, the physical aspects of Category Romance were alluded to (“he took the ribbon from her hair” and we break for the next scene), or at most stopped with kiss...

Years ago I used to fight with my kids for my sacred space to write in. I had a room that was called my study where I had a desk and a typewriter --- yeah, I started writing in the dark ages. Problem was, the study soon became the room where stuff was stored when nobody knew where else to put it. So I would have an odd assortment of boxes and bins and things stacked in and around the desk and filing cabinet that made finding my space a challenge. Then if we had company, either the company stayed in the office and slept on the sofa bed or one of the kids did. First obstacle to overcome was finding the sofa bed under the piles of things "stored" in the office. Then came the challenge of figuring out if it was an invasion of a guest's privacy if I went into the study now and then to work. Now that the kids are grown and out of the house, I have an office all to myself. Or at least I thought I did, until the cats decided they would like to share the space ...

Should you edit your blog after publication? Sounds like a simple question - right? And yet there is much written on this topic and strong feelings abound. On the 'no' side (more accurately stated as the "ABSOLUTELY NOT!" side) people feel that editing should only take place before you publish your blog article, that to make changes afterwards is cheating. There are at least two trains of thought on the 'yes' side. 1. We are professionals and professionals work to perfect their products. If you spot a problem after publication, fix it - ASAP. 2. The blogging media offers editing options that weren't available in earlier eras. In the world of print media, we can't easily correct an editing error. That is not true with blogs. Mistakes are easily fixed. We should embrace the technology and fix the errors. There is even a third point of view - an attempt at compromise. The idea here is to fix the error, but in a 'red-line' mode, meanin...