Suppose you deeply love your half-sister, Desiree, someone you’ve grown up with and been close to for most of your twenty-eight years. But two years ago you despaired about her self-destructive lifestyle and cut off all contact. Less painful,…
Category: Literature and Writing
Review: By Way of Sorrow by Robyn Gigl
By Way of Sorrow by Robyn Gigl My rating: 4 of 5 stars Erin McCabe and Duane “Swish” Swisher, criminal defense attorneys, are asked to defend a Black transgender woman accused of murder. Erin is a white transgender woman, and…
“Once You Go This Far” review
Once You Go This Far by Kristen Lepionka My rating: 5 of 5 stars This complex and intriguing mystery is the fourth to feature Roxanne Weary, the Columbus, Ohio PI. Rebecca Newsome, in her fifties or early sixties, is found…
Quick-Start Scrivener Guide
I’ve maintained that it’s not hard to start benefiting from Scrivener. You don’t need all the bells and whistles. Here’s an “easy steps” starting guide I posted about a year ago on the Guppies list: A Scrivener “project” consists of…
Review: “Bitter Medicine” by Sara Paretsky
This is the 4th novel in the V. I. “Vic” Watshawski, P. I., series, an interesting story of murder and medicine, set in 1985 or ’86. The central issue is, who killed Dr. Malcolm Tregiere, the assistant at the women’s…
Beversluis Wins Short Story Contest
The Weekly Knob, an online publication, has chosen “Feuds,” a short story by Eric Beversluis, as one of the two winning stories in its first story competition. Each week The Weekly Knob sets a household item as a prompt and…
One Grate Task
Challenged to write something involving a cheese grater, our author finds art imitating life, creating existential tension. 4 minute read.
Review: Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart
These days we take female police officers for granted, even if they still don’t have the same status and representation that male officers have. These days we take the legal rights of labor—to organize and strike—for granted, even if management…
Brenda Ueland on Chekhov and Passions
“Yet it is consoling that if [Chekhov] did not know all about cruelty, gluttony, cowardice, coldness in himself, he could not have written about them. Great men feel and know everything that mean men feel, even more clearly, but they…