Category: Other Cool Blogs

Y is for You Can

Erin Penn 5 Comments

Image acquired from the Internet Hive Mind 

I want to reiterate, it is okay to give up. Some things aren’t worth the price. There is SO MUCH you can do with your life; go after the stuff you really want, that you have a chance of achieving, and that won’t hurt other (and if possible, do the stuff that will help others).

For writing or editing or reading or embroidery or art or whatever, if it makes you happy. If you go back and look things over and say…I’m getting better. If you like it – for goodness sakes, keep going. You may never make it big time, but you are allowed to have HOBBIES. You don’t have to master everything. You don’t have to make money at it. Don’t give up / you can to it quadrant is the best.

But don’t ignore the “give up” quadrants. They are equally legitimate. And they give you more time to live in the Don’t give up/you can do it quadrant with the things you really, really want to do.

Other Cool Blogs: T is for Thriller

Erin Penn 7 Comments

Photo by Chris Grafton on Unsplash

One of the challenges of writing is focusing the story. Say you know you have written a Thriller, but thrillers are tight, pared down to the basics and yours…has excess. But what do you keep and what do you jettison? Obviously filler (Cutting the Filler 5/2/2024) and dead words (10/9/2018) go, but that is removing stuff…how do you focus it? One of the ways is figuring out which particular subgenre you story fits into.

Doing a general search of “<genres of choice> subgenres” can help you figure out where your story should fall. For thrillers there are Medical Thrillers, Legal Thrillers, and Techno Thrillers, just to name a few. In an old (September 12, 2011) post, Katherine Roid at Scribbling on the Computer (https://kathrineroid.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/list-of-thriller-subgenres/) describes several thriller subgenres. In addition the post includes links to her science fiction and fantasy subgenres. If you want to know more about mysteries, a search on “mysteries subgenres” will open a plethora of options to better focus your story.

My personal favorite is Romantic Thriller or, more accurately, Thriller Romance where Romance has dominance over the Thriller aspect. Do you have a favorite Thriller subgenre, or a genre where Thriller is the subgenre?

S is for Satire

Erin Penn 6 Comments

Image acquired from the Internet Hive Mind 

This is an important thing to remember when writing humorous stories, whether funny characters, humorous situations, parody of genre, or any of a number of different LOL aspects of writing. Punch up when punching up the laughs.