CHARACTER and PLOT by Leigh Lundin For the first Sunday column of the new year, we turn to our erudite friend, Louis Willis, who took time before the holidays to write for us. Louis is a scholar, writer, and critic with a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. You […]

A PACK OF LIES by John M. Floyd I once heard an aspiring author say, “Since I’m writing fiction, I don’t have to worry as much about logic in my stories.” Her point was, it’s all make-believe anyway, so her plots don’t always have to make sense. Right? Wrong. Fiction has to be even more […]

EIGHTY-SIX BANDERSNATCHES by Steve Steinbock According to our records here at Criminal Brief Central, this is my eighty-sixth column on this esteemed web-log. Eighty-six is an odd number. According to mathematicians, it is a semi-prime number as well as a happy number. In binary, it looks like this: 1010110. When Mel Brooks and Buck Henry […]

2009 – BRING IT ON by Deborah Elliott-Upton “We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.” – Edith Lovejoy Pierce There’s something magical about starting anew. Like new notebooks for September back-to-school […]