DASHES AND SPLATS by John M. Floyd Sounds like a football game, right? Actually, I’m referring to marks of punctuation. And since we at this blog are writers ourselves, and have already done a number of columns about punctuation and several about the titles of stories/novels/movies, well, today I thought I’d put those two subjects […]

THE FIRST LITTLE PIGGY by John M. Floyd Last September I did a column about reference books for the craft of writing, which included resources like Stephen King’s On Writing, Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages, etc. I have a weakness for that kind of how-to book, and as you might expect, some of them […]

TOTALLY LOST by John M. Floyd Not long ago one of my writer friends told me she’d be glad when she finished working on her current novel so she could start reading again. “So you can what?” I asked. “So I can start reading again,” she said. “I never read fiction while I’m writing fiction […]

SOUP-FROM-THE-CANNES FILM FESTIVAL by John M. Floyd I love movies. Movies, like books, have always been one of my obsessions. For the past eight weeks, though, my film addiction has had a chance to flourish: my wife has been away and assisting her elderly parents in Oklahoma, and I’ve been left at home to my […]

A SERIES SITUATION by John M. Floyd Over the past couple weeks I’ve had something take place, writingwise, that hasn’t happened often. In fact it hasn’t happened to me since maybe 2002. No, I didn’t write a story without committing a comma error, and no, I didn’t come down with an attack of writer’s block. […]

A DARK AND STORMY BRAIN by John M. Floyd I’ve heard a lot of authors, among them Lawrence Block and Harlan Coben, say that there’s one question they always get, sooner or later, whenever they’re introduced as an writer—and it’s often the first question they get. We’ve talked about it a lot at this blog, […]

THINK YOU USED ENOUGH DYNAMITE THERE, BUTCH? by John M. Floyd Just a thought: how many times have I read a long novel and wondered why it was so long, or read a short novel and wondered if it should have been a short story instead? Sometimes I even think a long novel should have […]