Marie at 1 Write Way

The recent attention and acclaim Flannery O’Connor’s previously unpublished “Prayer Journal” has received inspired me over the holidays to pull out my well-thumbed marked up copy of her selected letters, THE HABIT OF BEING (edited by Sally Fitzgerald and originally published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1979).  It had disappeared in my bulging over-stuffed bookcases because the book’s colorful jacket was long gone, having fallen apart years ago, and the book itself is bound in dull black cloth.  I had to search and re-search the shelves before I located it finally by homing in on the bristling yellow post-its, tabs and whatnot marking favorite passages. Yes, there it was, hunkered down rather like a small porcupine with colorful quills springing out in all directions, lurking in the shadows on a top shelf.

As per my usual encounter with this treasure trove of writerly wisdom informed by faith and a lively intellect, I immediately fell into it head first…

This is the fourth in our ‘Five Reasons’ series, which could carry the alternative name of ‘Forgotten Victorians’, since every writer we’ve looked at so far has belonged to that period: our previous posts have been on George Meredith, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Ernest Dowson. Now it’s the turn of George du Maurier (1834-96), or George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier, to give him his full name. Here are the five reasons we’ve discovered for why we should all know this Victorian writer.

1. He was also a talented cartoonist, who drew what is perhaps the most famous Victorian cartoon. The cartoon in question, ‘True Humility’, appeared in Punch magazine for which du Maurier drew many cartoons from the 1860s onwards. The cartoon (see right), is the origin of the phrase ‘curate’s egg’, used to refer to something that is ‘good in parts’ – a mixed bag…

When I began writing I was SO SURE agents would be fighting over my manuscript. Yeah. But after almost thirteen years in the industry, a lot of bloody noses, and even more lessons in humility, I hope that these tips will help you. Self-publishing is AWESOME, and it’s a better fit for certain personalities and even content (um, social media?), but we must be educated before we publish.

Mistake #1 Publishing Before We Are Ready

The problem with the ease of self-publishing is that it is, well, too easy. When we are new, frankly, most of us are too dumb to know what we don’t know. Just because we made As in English, does not automatically qualify us to write a work spanning 60,000-100,000 words. I cannot count how many writers I’ve met who refuse to read fiction, refuse to read craft books, and who only go to pitch agents…

As an appendix to our previous post on the interesting history of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, here is a link to a Youtube video containing the first known film adaptation of Dickens’s classic story. Directed by Walter R. Booth, the British-produced film was only a short piece, and the only surviving footage we have is incomplete.

Today is our final segment from AMAZING author and WANA International Instructor Kevin Lucia. Why horror? If you’ve followed this series, you now know many of the books you might already love are actually horror, but tend to be classified under different names—science fiction, dark fantasy, noir, etc. So for us to shiver and say, “Oh, I don’t like horror” is funny because most of us have been enjoying horror for a long time.

Sort of like how Mom hides the green veggies in a cheesy casserole ;).

Oh, what vegetables? Look at all the CHEESE!*whistles innocently*

Horror is a very important, but often misunderstood and overlooked genre. Yet, it is one of the most powerful. Much of the literature that has endured for generations and even altered society and science can thank horror. A great example? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (every ambulance now has chest paddles to use electricity to…