Last week I received the new book of poetry, Free Papers, by my friend, Mary Moore Easter. In poetry that grips and won’t let go, she chronicles the path to freedom of Eliza Winston, a woman enslaved in Mississippi. It is a wrenching story of heartbreak and persistence. Eliza’s grit and determination to win the […]
You may be wondering about the title. I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything close to what you might be thinking. It’s one of my mother’s colorful expressions. In common usage the phrase would be spoken “Have MERcy”, and would be a supplication. My mother, Ella, on the other hand, would say “HAAVE mercy!”, with “Haave” […]
I took the plunge last week and signed up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) 2020. My goal is to finish revising the first draft of my novel, Destiny Reclaimed (working title). With the help of my astute, compassionate, and generous critique group, I have already made considerable progress, and have learned a lot about […]
No, I am not paraphrasing a current racist political dog whistle. I am offering a commentary on it. The title of this post is in fact the title of a poem by a well-known African American poet, Langston Hughes. He wrote it in 1935 (!). In a recent conversation with my daughter, Tara, the Busboys […]
I love words. It’s fun and challenging to choose the perfect one for the situation–my brain is like a quivering mouth salivating in front of a sumptuous buffet and deciding whether to take scalloped, roasted, or Duchesse potatoes–or maybe go in a different direction and take the Belgian endive. The right word enables descriptive, concise, […]
“that his justice cannot sleep forever….” The phrase entices one to wonder, when? When will it be that God will wake his sleeping justice and unleash it on this nation? How loud and terrifying a clamor must His justice raise, what kind of ‘terrible swift sword’ must it wield to make Americans right the wrongs […]
The winding road of my journey to conceive, research, and write my novel, Destiny Reclaimed, led me to the wondrous Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa. The Fon people, who inhabited the kingdom, had a rich culture. Their history, customs, beliefs, and characters present a garden of outrageous blossoms to seed a writer’s imagination. One […]
I am a member of two writing critique groups – one, a subset of the larger group, is composed of five aspiring novelists. Both groups meet twice monthly to read each others’ work and offer feedback. The experience is immensely helpful in my journey to become a writer. For our last two meetings I was […]
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 […]
The Plot Thickens 