The other day at Borders I was browsing the tables up front and came across this interesting find: America’s Most Wanted Recipes. It’s a collection of recipes from popular restaurants, like Chili’s, the Olive Garden, and KFC. What a great idea, I thought. Because it is. An interesting book, one that should appeal to a…
Author: Jane Kalmes
The Truth About Working at Home… With Your Husband
A while back I wrote about the ugly Truth About Working at Home. Since Mark’s joined me at home while he works on a programming project of his own, I thought it was time for an update about life in a home office for two. 1. You will spend more time making food. I’m perfectly…
Me, Myself, and Kitty
As I’m editing my book, there are a lot of tasks on my plate: smoothing plot, seeding suspicions. But one of the most important things I’m doing is crystallizing the character of my protagonist, Kitty. It’s a lot of work. When I started out I had a vague idea of who she was: sort of…
World Building 101
Fantasy writers know what world building is. It’s where you flesh out all the details of your story’s strange milieu. How does magic work? What do they eat for breakfast in Upper Malefickia? And what is the name of those pirhanna-like fish you put in the river your heroes have to cross? But my book…
No One Cares Whodunit
I recently finished reading Save the Cat, by Blake Snyder. (Loved it!) Although it was chock full of useful info, the one piece of wisdom that really resonated with me was a single word: Whydunit. That’s the term the author uses for the mystery genre. When I read it, it was like one of those…
Guest Room Reads
I love having house guests. Love it so much, in fact, that I am always trying to tweak the guest facilities. The last addition was a pen and stationary pad for the bedside table. And I’m currently considering adding a power strip. Then there’s the stack of books that sits beside the bed in the…
Oh…. of course!
One of the smartest things I ever heard about writing is that the end of your story should be surprising and inevitable. What’s that? Surprising… and inevitable? Surely those are contradictory. Well, sort of, yes. But you still have to do your best to hit them both. You’re going for an “Oh… of course!” moment….
I Do Like Their Cartoons, Though
Just finished reading an article in the New Yorker, whose contention is that “writing can’t be taught.” And I have to laugh. Because of all of the great myths about writing, there’s none I know to be so profoundly false. I don’t really understand why people go around saying something so patently stupid, unless it’s…
Got Issues?
I think it was Grace Paley who said something like, “A story needs two stories. Not plot and subplot, but two stories that relate to each other.” When I’m planning something to write, I refer to these two stories as the Acute Issue and the Chronic Issue. Acute Issues are, well, acute: “Don’t get eaten;”…
I Know You!
I wanted to expand a bit on my “Character is about constancy” statement from a few weeks back–mainly because it flies in the face of all conventional storytelling wisdom. My writing group is always talking about character change: “What changes for this character?” “Yes, but how is he changed by these events?” “I’m not seeing…