Mirka Muse

 Every New Year's Eve we celebrate what I can only call "Hope and Change." It's not the year that passed, counting blessin...

 I have no issue with those who insist that only "Happy Holidays" is the way to greet people whose observances are unknown to the ...

  Having had complete loss of my desktop(s) not once, not twice, but (gulp) thrice in a period of a year, the matter of preserving one’s wor...

  We grasp reality through stories. But before we have sentences that make paragraphs, we have symbols.   I quote the first part of my f...

  *What’s not to like?   Someone asked me yesterday how I feel about being criticized. Simple: I don’t like it, but I’m not against it...

  Thanksgiving week, and all across the continent folks are discussing recipes, menus, and the now-ubiquitous “here come the holiday blues.”...

  When I asked writing friends where they go to clear their heads of cluttered mental debris and recharge, I heard “the beach” more times th...

  Other than my own, there are few traditionally published books whose inception and labor pains I have witnessed.   Today, a spectacula...

  You may be right to take the title of this post two ways. The first is asking about the imaginary audience for one’s words and stories. Th...

  I adore first person present tense. Present tense takes me, as a reader, right in. I’m here, and here we go together, all the way until ...

  It’s a tough question.   As a feeling, it forms our orientation every day. One day this way, and the next, that-a-way.   But the r...

  Friends of mine, living in Israel, told me their GPS has stopped working.   “It keeps insisting we are in Beirut,” they said.   Th...

  Going back to Karen Jones’ questions for writers (see here )— I find this one intriguing.   If writerly voice = the personality of the...

  Editors, I’m told, don’t like prologues.   A story needs to start in the present. Prologue forces us readers to scroll back before we’...

  On my previous agent quest, one of the agents I queried had this question on her submission form: Was the manuscript, in whole or in par...

  Going back to Karen Jones Gowens’ list of questions for writers,   ( see here ) I will address my personal take on the matter of whether s...

  “A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” That which is so dense and secretive as to be totally indecipherable or impossible to...

  Structure is the first aspect of building a story. It’s also how we frame coherent thoughts. This post speaks of how crucial it is for ...

  I picked this question from Karen Jones’ post on the list of questions she’d like to ask writers:   If you have written your book, do y...

  plat·form /ˈplatˌfôrm/ noun 1.       a raised level surface on which people or things can stand. "there are viewing platfor...