My poem, “My Wishing Star on a Long Ride,” which appeared in Eclectica’s July/August 2015 issue, will soon appear in one of their four forthcoming 20th anniversary anthologies! It’s nice to have a poem make several appearances, and not just one or two. Eclectica is running a Kickstarter campaign to sponsor the anthology, so if you feel inclined to make a contribution, follow the link — every donation helps! Here’s the poem — it makes…
To help us all tilt our pens forward and launch them into a vibrant and productive 2016, I thought I’d share some bad news and some good news about writing. First the bad news. Kristen Lamb’s blog entry today sums up the bad news about publishing, for the writer. Never mind if book sales are up over Kindle sales, and don’t bother with the debate about Amazon vs. Indie bookstores. You’re almost never going to…
Unless your main character has OCD, s/he has somewhere she habitually leaves messy. A MC’s mess can point to her attitude in life. Kitchen? Living room? Bedroom? Mine is my desk. Where I can pile books and file folders, defining me as someone always looking forward rather than paying attention to details. Your protagonist’s way of making a mess may be an important trait. It may even involve magic. In magical realism in women’s fiction…
Emotion is important in fiction, but thought and will are also a huge component of character and character development. You can identify with a character’s thoughts and decisions when she’s under stress. One of life’s pleasurable but stressful activities is travel. Since my novel’s main character is on a three-week, intensive tour of Renaissance Italy, stress is a given. May Gold combats it through her Gratitude Practice. I gave May this habit of enumerating things…
Next Sunday, October 11, at 3 pm in picturesque Crockett, California, I’ll be a featured reader at the Valona Deli Second Sunday Poetry Series. Coordinator Connie Post kindly invited me. If you’re in the SF Bay Area and can make it, it would be wonderful to see you! There’s an open mic after the two featured readers, and a terrific jazz ensemble plays at 6 pm after the poetry. Visit https://racheldacus.net for more information and…
A great title gets us reading with a good title as a good first line. Or maybe just as hard — first lines also bear the full weight of the reader’s entry — and have at times despaired over that blank space where the title should go. When I wrote my article The Challenge of the Title, published by Avatar Review, essays on creating titles have proliferated, along with the need for titles because of…
Photo: Nadya Phillips, Venice 2015 In writing a novel or story a writer gives lots of thought to what happened to the main character before she or he arrived at the beginning of the tale, but have we considered where she goes after the ending? If you’re contemplating a sequel or a series, it’s a natural question. But how to begin to answer? J.K. Rowling planned not only her characters’ arcs, but their futures beyond…
Can writing poetry ever pay enough? And do we need it to? For those of us taking advantage of the fall season to submit work to recently opened journals, there’s a new way to see if any on your target list pay for poems. Most print journal do pay, but only in copies. For online published poems, my stipend is merely the exposure to readers. But why not get at least a monetary token of…
“Hope is the thing with feathers” led me in an interesting direction: a series of poems with birds in them. Inspired in part by Emily Dickinson’s interest in birds and her many bird poems–which I found collected in a book called A Spicing of Birds –I wrote a series to decipher the messages I hear in the silver clamor of morning and evening birdsong. One poem, “Year Year I First Heard Birdsong”, found its way…
I thought of Bernini as a mage and master — a magician and a master of sculpture — long before I saw the title of the article. As I worked on my novel, The Renaissance Club I studied the great Gianlorenzo Bernini and his works. Bernini plays a leading role in my story, along with a young art historian who worships the 17th century artist. I looked at many still images and videos of his work,…