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MARGARET FIELAND INTERVIEW (guest blogger)

When did you first know you were destined to be a writer? LOL, I never realized I was destined to be a writer -- I fell into it. I'd written poetry for years, collecting it in notebooks stacked in my attic when I wrote one I wanted to keep. This led me to several online sites and ultimately to discovering the Muse Online Writers Conference where I hooked up with Linda Barnett Johnson and joined her writers forums. She required everyone to write both fiction and poetry, so, with much trepidation, I started writing fiction. Then I got hooked on it, wrote a chapter book, took the ICL course and actually learned how to write it. Then in 2010, I was seized by a desire to write a sci fi novel, so I spent six weeks or so on world building, mostly, with a bit of plotting thrown in for good measure. Who would you cite as your influences? I'm a way-back sci-fi fan, and Robert A. Heinlein influenced me heavily. I took a lot away from his writing, notably the value of surpris...

Those S and ES Endings by Mary Deal

These endings have always troubled me until I finally decided to get it right. Compare the versions and pick out the correct usages in this name ending with the letter s . The Joneses came for dinner. The Jones’s came for dinner. The Jones came for dinner. John Joneses car stalled. John Jones car stalled. John Jones’s car stalled. That Jones’s girl. That Joneses girl. That Jones girl. The correct sentences are: The Joneses came for dinner. John Jones’s car stalled. That Jones girl. Some tips: When a name ends with an s, and when speaking of the family as a group, add es , as in Joneses. When speaking about something John Jones owned, it is his property and, therefore, an apostrophe and s shows ownership, as in Jones’s . When speaking about a person in the singular, use only the name Jones. However, when speaking about a group of girls all named Jones, you would write that sentence: The Jones girls . Notice that the name stays...

On Writing Chase Scenes

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson Author of The Frugal Editor, the winning-est in her award-winning HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers This article is excerpted from some editing I did for a writer of experimental fiction when I was on a Greater Los Angeles Writers Society panel writer of any genre can apply these suggestions to the chase, getaway, or high action scene in your script or manuscript before you send it to an agent or publisher or, better still, while you are writing the first draft. Sometimes even the most fascinating, interesting and irresistible detail can slow down the forward movement of your story. So as much as writers are told that detail is important, purge as much as you can from your action scenes and put it somewhere else or dribble it into narrative in other places in your manuscript. In the process, ask yourself if your reader really needs to know the color of the protagonist’s eyes. As important as detail is, ...

Linda Barnett-Johnson

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