Sometimes a Bad Day Turns Into a Good Day, Especially If There’s Gin by Margaret Fenton 2007 was a great year. I went to Killer Nashville in August. I paid a lot of extra dollars and was given the opportunity to pitch my unpublished manuscript to either an agent or a representative from Oceanview Publishing. […]

Juxtaposing “Days of Wine and Roses” and “Where Did the Summer Go?” You know how a song gets caught in your head? Two phrases are ringing in my ears, but I don’t know how or why my brain thinks they go together. Logically, they don’t. There just isn’t an intellectual way to reconcile “Days of […]

When I moved to the Berkshires many years ago, I was an aspiring writer. So, I naturally sought out other authors who had lived and written there. The author with whom I felt the most kinship and who turned out to be an important influence on a novel I would eventually write was Edith Wharton. […]

Usually, I write my blogs in advance and have them prescheduled to pop up at six in the morning. With Yom Kippur, the most important Jewish holiday, during which we atone for our sins and on which our fate for the next year is sealed, being this past weekend and a number of other things […]

Touched by the Bard – Shakespeare’s Influence on the Haydn Mysteries by Nupur Tustin It was from the Cambridge Companion to Haydn that I learned that the great composer’s library contained the complete volume of Shakespeare’s plays—in the original English at that. Shakespeare’s plays were quite popular in the German-speaking world. They were enacted in […]

Writing to a Theme by Carol L. Wright Remember back in school when the teacher would give you an assignment to write on a particular theme? Something along the lines of “What I Did on my Summer Vacation” or “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up”? Well, for those of us who grow […]

Do You Love Me?  by Debra H. Goldstein Many of you know I love Broadway shows. There is a Facebook test making the rounds where one identifies how many, out of one hundred shows, one has seen either on Broadway or in some other theater production. I’m so nerdy, my score was over 80 – […]

Day of the Dark, an anthology of eclipse related short stories, was published by Wildside Press on July 21, one month before North America experiences its first contiguous total eclipse in forty years. In my last “It’s Not Always a Mystery” blog, I introduced you to the anthology’s creator, Kaye George, my short story, A […]

It hasn’t happened in almost four decades.  For some, August 21, 2017 will be the only time in their lives to experience a total solar eclipse passing over the contiguous United States. August 21, will you be somewhere between Oregon and South Carolina, wearing proper eye protection, watching the moon pass between the earth and […]

Writing “As If” to Reignite Your Creative Mojo by Bryan E. Robinson, Ph. D. Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. —Dani Shapiro Raise your hand if you’ve ever been unsure which direction to […]