Looking for the Best Word? Tip #57

    A series of posts for all word lovers. Offering help for writers and language learners, these posts look at many different aspects of the world of words in the hope of stimulating your curiosity and enhancing your creativity. Please be aware this post was scheduled prior to my annual break from all things …

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An American Cage, by Ted Galdi: #BookReview.

This thriller is much more than that. Generally, thrillers are notorious for their concentration on story at the expense of character. In An American Cage, however, Galdi has broken that mould. He’s devised a tale that threads character throughout the story without adversely affecting pace and engagement. Written in present tense, and from an omniscient …

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Looking for the Best Word? Tip #56

    A series of posts for all word lovers. Offering help for writers and language learners, these posts look at many different aspects of the world of words in the hope of stimulating your curiosity and enhancing your creativity. This week’s words: Ambitious/Apathetic; Consonance; Advance planning; Down to earth. Ambitious - Roget lists these …

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Looking for the Best Word? Tip #55

    A series of posts for all word lovers. Offering help for writers and language learners, these posts look at many different aspects of the world of words in the hope of stimulating your curiosity and enhancing your creativity. This week’s words: Help, Incredibly, A word to the wise, Shinrin-yoku, Contronym: Help Help: belongs …

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Progress on the WIP: #SciFi in the Making.

As work on this is mostly confined to the void that occupies most of my skull, I don’t have a lot to report today. Preparation, they say, is all. My method of moving toward the writing of a piece is to gather together my characters, something I’ve mostly achieved, though some are proving elusive for …

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Travelling Light, by Vickie Johnstone: #BookReview.

I exercise a degree of caution when reviewing poetry, since I’m by no means a competent practitioner. Therefore my judgment is necessarily both subjective and lacking in personal experience. This is a pleasant read with a great deal of variety in the poems offered. There's rhyme and blank verse here. For me, the blank verse …

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Emanation: Shadeward Saga #1, by Drew Wagar: #BookReview.

    Genre can be the bane of the author’s life: most publishers insist on slotting fiction into predefined pigeonholes. But some books defy this process, either merging genres or crossing boundaries. Emanation is such a book. It is, essentially a science fiction book, but reads, certainly in the beginning, like a fantasy novel. It’s …

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Looking for the Best Word? Tip #54

    A series of posts for all word lovers, offering help for writers and language learners. This week’s words: Important; Congeries; Hopeful optimism; Heard it through the grapevine. Important - Roget lists these headers: crucial, fundamental, necessary, and important. Under the sub-heading ‘important’ are a further 84 alternatives, including weighty, big, earth-shaking, critical, radical, …

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Looking for the Best Word? Tip #53

    Help for writers and language learners. This series of posts is a resource for all word lovers. This week’s words: Gabble, Left, Chiasmus, Genuinely, and, Gilding the lily. Gabble - Roget lists these headers: ululate, empty talk, speak, stammer, and be loquacious. Under the sub-heading ‘loquacious’ are a further 68 alternatives, including talkative, …

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Creative #Writing #Contests Table Updated

    For my photographs on Picfair, please click here. Here’s your monthly reminder that the writing contest table has been updated. I update frequently; in fact, whenever I come across new contest details. I also subscribe to a few sources for information to pass on to you here. Make sure you submit your entries …

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The Purple Bowtie, by Lisabeth Reynolds: #BookReview.

[A review is a personal opinion. No reviewer can represent the view of anyone else. The best we can provide is an honest reaction to any given book.]   This book is listed as ‘lesbian romance’. So, what attracted an agnostic, heterosexual man to delve into its pages? The description intrigued me to begin with. …

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Looking for the Best Word? Tip #52

    Offering help for writers and language learners, this series of posts is a resource for all word lovers. This week’s words: Fabricate, Fairly, Desbundar, Facts of life. Fabricate - Roget lists these headers: compose, produce, imagine, fake. Under the sub-heading ‘fake’ are a further 24 alternatives, including forge, plagiarize, trump up, rig, spin, …

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Looking for the Best Word? Tip #51

    Offering help for writers and language learners, this series of posts is a resource for all word lovers. This week’s words: Euphemism, Asyndeton, 9 p.m. at night, can of worms. Euphemism - Roget lists these headers: underestimation, trope, falsehood, ornament, good taste, affectation, flattery, and prudery. Under the sub-heading ‘prudery’ are a further …

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A Night Shift, by Joshua Scribner: #BookReview.

This short piece of dark fantasy puts a different spin on a popular theme, and carries it through with some dark humour. It’s a compact story, told simply but with great effect. We know as much as we need to about the characters and watch as the tension slowly builds to the denouement, which contains …

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The Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe: #BookReview.

It’s dangerous to review a much-loved and respected classic; even more so for an author. So I face this review with some trepidation. The story is, of course, of its time; a period when readers had fewer distractions, were happy to read wordy stories, and were educated enough to understand the subtleties of language. I …

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