Mirka Muse

In late April Microsoft unveiled a site that for no charge or sign-in will let you upload photos of anyone and have the wizard of facial an...

You've  heard all the “ can't -be-done”s to last you a lifetime. Now it’s time to push ‘em back. When I started writing with th...

…Until You Know It Would you like to know the future? I mean, if a genie granted you the wish to see your timeline on this earth, would...

I recently joined Twitter, more out of curiosity, (and a tiny soft suggestion from my agent) and immediately found it overwhelming. It was ...

Every language has a personality, and when I think about Yiddish, I think “self-mocking,” “Ironic,” and “wistful humor.” The last contains ...

… But also HOW you say it. Thomas Hardy said that if Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him...

April fifteen just about here, and all over our great nation folks are slaving away to get numbers in order and pay, or at lease pay homag...

There’s that repeated question adults, and kid-lit writers specifically, often posit: will kids this-or-that age get this? Kids understan...

The old chicken-and-egg debate has a writerly version. Should you start from plot, or from character? My usual answer would be that it ...

I have a dear Beta reader whose logical mind helps catch inconsistencies and discontinuities in my stories. Every writer should be so lucky...

A cleverer writer coined this wonderful expression of artistic  bipolar  mood disorder. It struck me as an apt description of what every cr...

One of the many writerly rules is to avoid the passive voice. I'm  on record as ranting about “rules” and the slavish following of ...

The hysterically enthusiastic reaction to the announcement that Harper Lee, the author of the American literary classic To Kill a Mockingbi...

It occurred to me how preachy my last post came across. Not the first or last time I rode the preacher’s revival bus. I must have been one ...

“ People’s good deeds are used by the eternal as seeds for planting trees in the Garden of Eden: thus, each of us creates our own paradise ...

I'm  a fan of odd facts, sometimes called factoids. Not the mainstream, what everyone-and-their-cousin thinks is important, relevant, v...

Somehow I just know I will wind up a crazy cat lady. How do I know? When visiting an old friend, I discovered she had become one. I...

There are certain formulas we have become accustomed to in story telling.  You've  heard of  “set the problem, pose three obstacles in ...