It may be the end of July, but the reading never stops. For your browsing pleasure, please check out the lists below. You'll probably find plenty to add to your TBR (to-be-read) virtual or paper-based stacks of books for the rest of summer and beyond. The Booklist Reader has a list of authors and books to tackle for various July events, including Canada Day, the Fourth of July, P.T. Barnum's birthday, and Bastille Day. (Note: the list is nine years old, but hey, some authors never go out of date.) BookBrowse lists their Best book for July 2019 . You'll find all kinds and flavors here. Click on a cover to learn more about a particular book. For the Fourth of July, the Cincinnati Public Library has recommendations for all ages and tastes. To stretch the timeframe a bit, Listopia's Best Children's Books about Summer provides plenty for small fry to devour—251 books in all. Now, to mysteries, because that's my favorite genre.  The Cozy Mystery List Blog ...

It’s become increasingly obvious that the fate of the world is keeping me from completing my current work in progress. Every day I try to concentrate, then a crisis distracts my attention and mires me in a variety of fears, insecurity, and shock. Where I used to worry about what my main character would do next or what I’d make for dinner, now I worry about the survival of our people from the cold and hot realities of life on this planet, children I don’t know and never will, and the threat of another foolish and unnecessary war. I worry that our government representatives, people we put in place to take care of those things, seem not to worry about anything other than enriching themselves and putting their ideological desires for power ahead of their own grandchildren. Doesn’t anyone consider the consequences? Have they never seen a dystopian movie or read a book where the aftermath of greed, the thirst for war, or the quest for power leaves us destroyed? Hell, if 1984 by George O...

Okay Dearies, Style Maven's Snarky Cousin is back after an extended time away. I do hope everyone had a simply marvelous good time while I was gone, writing those wonderful words of gold. I've abandoned my own words of gold to pop in to remind you darling new writers about a few basic elements of craft. In writing a book, it's not enough to put words on a computer screen and hit publish. Really it's not. It can have the most disastrous effect on readers. There was a time when one took classes - creative writing classes - in which we darling new writers learned important craft elements. One of which is the proper use of dialogue. For instance, if you have two longtime friends sharing a bit of bubbly and some juicy gossip, you totally spoil the moment with awkward exposition. What? You don't know what awkward exposition is? OMG, as the young people might say. Let me bring you in out of the cold. Your two lovely characters are chatting away when they start...

There are plenty of writers out there in the wilderness, many of them beginners, who will wail, “What do you mean too many ideas? I can even nail down one!” pexels.com  Others will know exactly what I mean. All the while one author is working on a novel, ideas for a sequel are percolating in the back of her mind. Thoughts pop up just before she goes to sleep, then are forgotten by morning. She’s writing contemporary crime fiction, but a historical novel picks at her brain, set in the state where she grew up and full of fictional content against events that really happened and people who really lived during the times. On the other hand, there’s that nagging feeling she’d really like to try writing romance. William Kent Krueger, author of the Cork O’Connor mystery series, tells of that story he’d wanted to write for a long time but didn’t get a lot of encouragement from his agent or publisher. The idea wouldn’t go away, and Krueger finally wrote it as a standalone. That nove...

How often have you answered the question, “Are you a pantser or a plotter?” with “I’m a bit of both” or “I’m somewhere in the middle”, or something along that line? In this video, at around the 50:30 mark , you can listen to Carrie Vaughn and Song of Ice and Fire (better known as Game of Thrones ) author George RR Martin discussing their approaches to writing and referring to “architects” and “gardeners”, which is an analogy Martin has used before instead of “plotter” and “pantser”. Presuming Martin is referring to landscape architecture (as opposed to building architecture, which would make less sense used as a metaphor alongside gardening) this analogy gives us a spectrum of different writing approaches, rather than the more dualistic argument of pantsing versus plotting. The Landscape Architect Like a professional landscape architect who has to produce an extremely detailed blueprint of their proposed design, sometimes down to the actual species and number of plants tha...

Known for its celebration of Independence Day in the U.S., the month of July inspired this discussion about a different kind of independence—one desired by a number of fiction writers. This Independence Day, however, is not observed on a specific date. It is celebrated any time an author chooses to step outside the proverbial box when writing a story from the heart. What exactly is Writers Independence Day? A recent BRP comment comparing genre fiction to literary fiction made me revisit those diverse methods of story writing. The person who wrote the comment stated she had not to date found a literary fiction book that engaged her sufficiently to make her finish it. No words exploded off the page to keep her reading. In what way does literary fiction differ from genre fiction? Several years ago, when I began researching how a book qualifies as being one genre or another, I discovered that specific rules dictate the writing of a genre story. These formulaic guidelines had to be...

Is the story on the page the same as the story in your head?  When you finish revision and final proofreading rounds, it is a good idea to give your finished manuscript a listen.  The process of listening to the narration highlights problems such as: 1. Smoothness of flow. 2. Awkward transitions between scenes or chapters. 3. Repetitive word usage. 4. Clunky, run-on, or repetitive dialogue and dialogue tags. 5. Missing and redundant information. 6. Awkward choreography of action scenes. 7. Boring passages. 8. Ratio of narrative versus dialogue and action. 9. Spelling and grammar errors. 10. Missing words. Unless you can bribe or coerce someone to read your story to you, there are several tools to do the task. Most of them are free, or free for the basic program. Some offer additional voices or functions at a cost. The "narrators" sometimes stumble over words, but it won't insert words that aren't there the way your mind fills in ...

It's JUNE, the start of summer and perhaps a little more reading time for us all. If you delve into this list of June holidays , there's a mountain of holiday themes to plan your reading around. So, without further ado, here are a few holiday-themed June reading lists. Earlier this month, BRP blogger Maryann Miller offered up some Father's Day reads . Here are a few additional lists to consider: The Cozy Mystery List has a goodly sample right here .  Mystery Fanfare never lets me down, and won't let you down either. Here are some offerings for Father's Day .   Goodreads Listopia has a Fathers: Good, Bad and Surrogate list of books to consider.  Another Listopia has 260 picture books about fathers for the younger set.   Now, how about the rest of the month? Well, June is Gay Pride month. Image by Jasmin Sessler from Pixabay Hold your rainbow flag high with pride with these book lists: The McQuade Library created a Listopia of the LGBTQIA ...

There’s a big fat whirlpool trying to suck me back into total retirement mode. It lures me closer with its siren song of book titles (novels and non-fiction releases) I want to read, hobbies I want to revisit, new skills I want to learn (like playing that stupid ukulele I bought). What is constantly being pushed to the bottom of my priority list? Writing, revising, editing, blogging, and everything related. In order to keep up with my critique group, I’ve switched to submitting hurried first drafts of short stories which I intend to submit to anthologies if I get around to revising and submitting before the deadlines. I did get two stories submitted to two different anthologies. One was accepted and will appear in Five Star ’s November 2019 release of The Spoilt Quilt and Other Frontier Stories: Pioneering Women of the West . I haven’t heard back about the submission to the Northern Colorado Writers 2019 Anthology called Rise (which has beautiful cover art ). Two other or...

A friend on Facebook tagged me a few weeks ago to name seven books I loved. In no particular order, here are my seven choices and why I loved them. 1. Mystic River , by Dennis Lehane. To me, Mystic River is the perfect crime novel. It starts when three boys are playing in the street, and a big car pulls up. A man who claims to be a cop chooses the one boy who doesn’t live on the street and tells him to get into the car. He does. The story picks up about thirty years later, and how that one incident comes back to haunt them all. By the way, I crossed the Mystic River Bridge, now known as the Tobin Bridge, every day going to college. 2. Ordinary Grac e, by William Kent Kruger. A coming of age novel where a middle-age man looks back on his thirteen-year old life and the death of a friend and the family members who shaped his manhood. Beautifully written and evocative of time and place. 3. The Kite Runner , by Khaled Hosseini. Again, the main character looks back on his childhood ...

June 3 is National Chocolate Macaroons Day. June 7 is National Chocolate Ice Cream Day. June 11 is National German Chocolate Cake Day. June 16 is National Fudge Day (chocolate, of course). June 20 is National Ice Cream Soda (a personal chocolate story's attached to this one). June 22 is National Chocolate Eclair Day. June 26 is National Chocolate Pudding Day. June 27 is National Ice Cream Cake Day (definitely chocolate cake or chocolate ice cream). In case you haven't guessed by now, I'm an incurable chocoholic. For as long as I can remember, chocolate has topped my list of favorite treats—with one temporary (thankfully) exception. More on this later. My feelings about chocolate can best be stated by the following poem (and with profound apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning): How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My arm can reach, when hidden out of sight The creamy, sweet confection that...

Looking ahead to Father's Day, I thought it would be nice to feature a few books that would make a nice gift for your father. There is everything from humor, to inspirational, to fiction available and books always make a good gift. Maybe Dad would like that better than a tie.  I know my father did. There isn't room to list all the wonderful books out there, so I picked just a few. The Life Of Dad Jon Finkel Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: Adams Media (May 7, 2019) Language: English ISBN-10: 1721400303 ISBN-13: 978-1721400300 Kindle $10.99 Hardcover $11.72 ABOUT THE BOOK A heartwarming and enlightening collection of advice, wisdom, and practical skills featuring an all-star cast of fathers from the popular online community Life of Dad. Becoming a dad gives men a VIP pass into the greatest club on earth: fatherhood. Its rewards are unmatched, its challenges, uncharted. The experience can reach euphoric highs and gut-punching lows. For those moments (and everythin...