MY REPLY TO STEPHEN FRY by James Lincoln Warren Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography – Language from Matthew Rogers on Vimeo. Today I’m wearing my Diction Cop helmet. As I mentioned last week, my work in fiction lately has been dominated by trying to find the right voice, and there is nothing more important in voice […]

HEARING VOICES by James Lincoln Warren Any scribe worthy of a paycheck works hard to make sure that his characters all speak differently from each other. Having everybody use exactly the same diction is boring and unrealistic. Where it becomes hardest to consistently keep a character’s voice unique isn’t in dialogue, though, it’s in a […]

The International Herald-Tribute by James Lincoln Warren Nero Wolfe Illustration by Carl Mueller American Magazine, November 1940 I just finished a project that took several years to come to fruition, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. I first had the idea for it when reading The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter […]

THE KING OF KINDLE Video and song by Parnell Hall, appreciation by James Lincoln Warren Everybody’s been writing about Bouchercon, so I haven’t had a lot to add. But then Steve Steinbock wrote to let me know that Parnell Hall’s special Bcon Edition of his latest video was up on YouTube, and he mentioned that […]

GARDEN PLOT by James Lincoln Warren A couple weeks ago Rob gave us an insight into how his creativity gets kick-started. I guess it’s fair to say that the concept for a story has a point of inception from which it subsequently germinates. Planting the seed, though, is not enough to make sure that an […]

BOUCHERCON 2010 SHORT STORY PANEL Posted by James Lincoln Warren Here’s the recording I made of our Bouchercon panel on Friday, October 15, featuring Melodie Johnson Howe, Robert Lopresti, Steve Steinbock, yours truly, Tim Wohlforth, and Angela Zeman, and moderated by Jill Amadio. The title of the panel was “In Case of Madness”, which made […]

BREVITY BEING THE SOUL OF WIT . . . by James Lincoln Warren Today’s Scribbler is of necessity brief. Criminally brief, if I may say so. This last week I’ve been busier than the proverbial one-armed paper-hanger. (Can anybody tell me what proverb contains a reference to a one-armed paper-hanger? No? @#$%&!.) To complicate matters, […]