Still on the “show, don’t tell” crusade. A recent post on the blog LiveWriteThrive emphasizes how modern audiences are used to the action in movies, TV, and video games. They want to be part of that action and they don’t want to wait to enter into it. That calls upon us writers to get to […]

This week my craft work included showing characters’ emotions. Still drawing from the 12 Fatal Flaws, I battled with how a girl in Dahomey in 1760 or so might tell her mother that she didn’t want to be married off right after reaching puberty. The very premise stretches credibility. This was a highly structured, polygamous […]

This is the second installment of my New Year’s resolution to stay current on my blog. This week in the category of craft improvement I worked on executing gems of instruction I found in the excellent little book, Twelve Fatal Flaws of Fiction Writing, C.S. Lakin, editor. I was working especially on the entries regarding […]

We finished the Christmas holiday with a 50th birthday party for my younger daughter, Tara. It was actually a family reunion, as she requested. About fifty people attended and Tara was thrilled. The timing was optimum, since cousins from all over the country, in town for the holiday, were able to make it. Back at […]

So, with Wednesday came the end of our wonderful stay in Holland. It was an almost perfect time, having a chance to visit everyone without rushing. There was only one missing piece. Although we didn’t see her, we remembered her well.

Can’t believe our visit is already just about over. We spent the day before our travel day with the Tolenaars. Fred very generously offered to take us on a tour of Delfshaven, the older, only un-bombed area of Rotterdam; the new market hall area; the Hoek of Holland, a beach area in the southwest corner of the […]

We took a train this morning to Amsterdam to visit Lynn Kaplanian Buller, a friend of Chan’s since Moscow days. Lynn has been a resident of Holland for forty-five years and owns the very successful American Book Center, with locations in Amsterdam and Den Haag. Willem and Lynn got acquainted, we had a lovely lunch, caught […]

Today was a day to regroup after the heavy scheduling of the previous six days. Plus, the town was taken over by soccer fever. Two clubs from Rotterdam were playing each other in semi-finals and fans from other places flooded into the city. The bar across the street from our hotel followed the example of others […]

Saturday was “catch up with the cousins” day. Elleke, on the left, and Mieke, on the right, are second cousins. Seeing Mieke’s mother, who was sick with cancer and who was married to the first cousin that Willem had spent a lot of time with as a young boy, was part of the reason for our […]

  The engraving at right is under the statue of an “everyman”. It reads, Unbroken Resistance 1940-1945. For the Netherlands, today was Bevrijdingsdag – Liberation Day; the day in 1945 when the Canadians and British liberated the majority of the country. The year before, in 1944, the Americans had liberated the southern provinces before moving […]