Mirka Muse

Oh, hum. A lament about what to write about....  Another one? For some reason this is not a problem I have struggled with. Truth be tol...

Remember the frantic repetition from MGM’s The Wizard of Oz— “Lions and tigers and bears, OH, MY!”—? It’s beginning to resemble my back...

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett A famous quotation. What in the blasted barn...

The French sociological positivist Hippolyte Taine said it perfectly: “I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of ca...

It’s a new lingo. ‘Splain it to me, Lucy~~~* *Quoting from I Love Lucy really dates me. Just the other day I asked a techie how t...

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...