Mirka Muse

  Some years ago, our family were on our way home after a beautiful winter hike. We had climbed mountains to view the ocean and passed count...

  It’s been almost a month since Sokolov died.   I want to say “left us” or “crossed the rainbow bridge” or some such, because the word ...

  If you ever purchased from the giants of the Internet retailers, you have run into an AI summary of the reviews the product has accumulate...

  When writing anything other than a blog post or a short picture book text, as the saying goes— it’s a marathon, not a sprint .   Begin...

  *You’d think that if you opened the link to this post, you’d find yet another high falutin speech on writing, cats, or living life. Fooled...

  There is a ubiquitous how-to writing suggestion to cut any of the text which isn’t serving the plot. This includes description of landscap...

  Where I live, the neighbors and the local news are rife with daily reports of break-ins, car “smash-and-grabs," phone and laptop thef...

  1861 Confederate states adopt new constitution In Montgomery, Alabama, delegates from South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Ge...

  A few months ago, I read an excellent post about intuition and its place in the writing process. See it here.   It wasn’t news to me ...

  Once every few months, I just feel compelled to share snippets of the joy that are my cats.   No, I’m not a “childless cat lady,” but ...

  Conventional wisdom, CW for short, is that there are the right times and the wrong times to query agents and editors. The month of Decembe...

  Thomas Edison should be the lodestar to every person who ever heard the victimization narrative and fell for it. Don’t. Just don’t buy...

  The voice of a story comes to me in the form of a line. For me, it’s usually the first sentence/paragraph.   This line also contains t...

  A few months ago, I realized that between the news (wars, crimes, the latest pathogens and some petty pointless bit—ing about others), and...

  The very word, “evocative,” is evocative.   The dictionary definition, “Serving to bring to mind. Making you remember or imagine some...

  There’s a well-known trope/parlor game/interview question that asks which long-dead persons you’d like to meet, have dinner with, intervie...

  One of the powerful tools in storytelling is the Ah-Ha! Moment.   It’s a character recognizing their fault, or not their fault, and ho...

  Back to answering another from Karen Jones’s blog post list: Are you excited about the idea of people reading your work…? I have alwa...

 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...