Writing
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I am admittedly milking my review of the pair of books that were recommended to me. The more I think about them, the more I recognize the need to share. For the sake of a 3 Sentence Review, I kept the original post brief and vague. Today I want to delve a little deeper into
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I was cool with being basic. Now I’m cooler being Next Level Basic. Next Level Basic, #NLB, is a best seller by Stassi Schroeder, an author, reality TV star, and podcaster. Being Next Level Basic is about having fun and celebrating yourself. Stassi is totally L.A.–via New Orleans– beautiful, slender, semi-famous with gorgeous hair, a
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Some friends and I recently attended a four week Forensics Camp through the Rock Valley College Continuing Education program. They sucked me in by appealing to my authorial sense of wonder. As in, I wondered how I could work these scientific details into a story! Every Tuesday for four weeks, my friends and I met
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Contemporary Relevance…the idea that a word, phrase, or cultural reference is no longer broadly understood. This subject has come up a lot lately. For instance, we were watching a show where they said, Kumbaya. With origins dating back to 1926, this word has come in and out of popularity with the meaning evolving over decades
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Last October, I was supposed to speak at an Author Fair. My chosen topic was, The Art and Exercise of Short Stories. I was unable to attend (you can probably guess why). Recently reinvigorated by DAWG meetings, I’m inspired to write short stories again! With Spring in the air and our creative-energy levels rising, I
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I thought the themes of Southern magic, romance, and humor were entertainingly woven into an engaging story and I was happy to discover this is book one in a four book series. I ‘read’ it on audio and the narrator, Shannon McManus, did a wonderful job crafting the Savannah drawl and invoking a sense of
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It’s a spectacular feeling to get through an entire story idea.Beginning, middle, and end, BOOM! written down.I have many partial first drafts.Many. It’s very drafty in here. Brrrr. (a little writer’s humor that might be funnier if I didn’t live in frigid Northern Illinois) I recently returned from a very successful writer’s retreat where I
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I had a couple of readers ask me why I bothered to finish The Burnt House if I disliked it so much. Seems like a fair question. I have a multi-part response: First, I don’t read like I used to. There was a time I devoured books! A book on the night stand, a book
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I want to share my thoughts on the books, television series, and movies that I read and watch, but I realize you’re probably bombarded with reviews already. I mean, everybody is binging in one form or another. And everybody has an opinion, right? So, I’ve got a gimmick. I’m going to summarize my review in
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Hopefully this year will be too, too amazing. Get it? ’22. We are SO due. Last year at this time, I stepped away from the weekly blog post to focus on getting other writerly things done. My word for the year was MOTIVATION. Let me correct, my word for that particular week, day, hour–moment? was
MARY LAMPHERE AUTHOR 