HOW TO SCRIBBLE by James Lincoln Warren This summer, on June 13 and 14, the Southern California Chapter of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime Los Angeles Chapter will be co-sponsoring a mystery writing workshop called the California Crime Writers Conference at the Hilton Pasadena here in sunny SoCal. (In previous years, SinC […]

REVISITING WOLPERTINGER by James Lincoln Warren It’s been a while since I dropped by to say hello to Mad Scientist Jakob Linnaeus Wolpertinger and his assistant Ivor. The last time we met, if you recall, he was trying to create a monster by revivifying dead prose and had come up with a species of jackalope. […]

THESAURUS REX by James Lincoln Warren If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time looking for le mot juste—I only know one writer (whose lucid prose I greatly admire) who claims to never use a thesaurus. I honestly don’t know how many books I have on words and usage, but there are quite […]

SERIES-OUS BUSINESS by James Lincoln Warren A common feature of genre fiction is the series protagonist. There are rare examples in mainstream literature—John Updike’s Rabbit books and John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga come to mind, and there’s also Anthony Trollope—but generally speaking, the series character is confined to science fiction, crime, adventure, suspense, horror, and fantasy. […]

ONCE UPON A WOO-WOO by James Lincoln Warren A few days ago, I got the following in my email: Dear MWA Members: Hot News!, Barry Zeman, Chair of the MWA Publication Committee, just received word that MWA has reached a tentative agreement with a leading publisher for the 2010 MWA Anthology, to be edited by […]

WORDIES by James Lincoln Warren … dixeris egregie, notum si callida verbum reddiderit iunctura novum. –Horace … you will express yourself eminently well, if a dexterous combination should give an air of novelty to a wellknown word. — trans. by Christopher Smart (1722 – 1771) Happy your art, if by a cunning phrase To a […]

FIRST LINES by James Lincoln Warren Received wisdom states that the two most important sentences in any story are the first sentence and the last sentence. This is supposed even more crucial for short fiction than for novels, since every word in a short piece is critical and there is no wiggle room. I don’t […]