Please, No!
By Annette Rey
F&W Media, the publisher of Writer’s Digest and more than fifty other magazines, announced Chapter 11 bankruptcy due to plummeting subscriptions and advertising revenue.
I invoke the little boy’s words as he looked up into the face of his hero, a beloved baseball player accused of throwing the 1919 World Series in the infamous Black Sox Scandal, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”
Help Beat Writer’s Block
By Annette Rey
Beat that blank page! There are lots of ideas out there to spark your brain, to pick up your pen, to place your fingers on the keyboard. Here is one of my favorite ways that works for me.
Radio Noir
In 2017 I posted one of my favorite articles on the gumshoe/street punk/police detective interactions on serial radio programs in the 1940s (read it). Not everyone owned a television set yet and home radio entertainment was a family event. Everything from sci-fi, comedy, horror, family, and mystery shows flowed into the ears of eager listeners.
I have Sirius radio in my car and listen to Radio Classics as I drive. I get a kick out of how the world was viewed then. And I admire the great writing of the programs I hear.
If you want to know how to give images to your work, to give your reader visuals of your story, listen to old radio broadcasts.
Following are great samples from one such program.
Six Reasons to Digitally Connect to Your Local Library
By Annette Rey
I love books – books I can hold, books I can smell, pages I can turn. I even take joy in categorizing them and lining them on shelves. I enjoy looking at the titles on their spines, and they seem to watch me from their lofty perches as I remember discovering their delectable secrets that revealed themselves as I lightly tiptoed, and sometimes hungrily dashed forward, through their words.
I didn’t think I could enjoy reading books on an electronic device, but the ease and convenience of acquiring reading material won me over. There are other reasons to give this a try, specifically as related to retrieving books from your local library through apps designed for any device.
By Annette Rey
Lonely Tower Dwellers Get Boring
Most writers would be happy sitting in a lonely tower, watching life passing by below their only contact with the outside world. They dream of a world where creativity is the only currency, where the necessity of promotion, advertising, cover art, synopses, queries, and other thieves of time do not exist.
But, even Thoreau had to mix with society to achieve publication. And so, we must do the same.
Radio Noir
By Annette Rey
This is a repost from April 2017 in case you missed it. It is one of my favorites.
Oh, for the days language was used that slapped the listener in the head, jangled his brain, and imparted a vivid visual view in a flash of a second. Machine gun language denoting so much information the listener is running a sentence behind the descriptive narrative. Radio language was used decoratively, stretching metaphors beyond the meaning of the technique.
When I’m driving, I listen to Sirius Classic Radio broadcasts from the 1930s and 1940s. This is how I can learn from, enjoy, and appreciate stimulating script writing.
I’d like to share the following excerpts with you.
Online Writing Lab
By Annette Rey
One of my reasons for writing this blog is to help writers understand that learning correct language usage should never stop. If we love to write, we should love the vehicle that takes our readers to places we want to transport them.
I especially sympathize with aspiring writers whose first language is not English. They need additional help navigating the complexities of the language.
The following site offers free access to instruction that will improve all of our efforts to polish our writing projects.
