No Mongoose in the Mimosa

Critiques and feedback are invaluable for a writer. No matter how brilliant your prose, there's always at least one sentence that sounded great in your head, but is open to other interpretations when read. Such a sentence can drop the reader out of his trance, or worse, confuse the reader so badly that she simply quits reading. In my limited experience, such nitpicky items are not the primary cause of a failed story. Indeed, a good story line may transcend even marginal prose. You may have seen such stories written by very successful authors (and no, I won't offer my opinion of any names here). Usually, you tell your friends about such stories, "He's not a very good writer, but he spins one hell of a yarn." You can use software to proof your document and likely catch better than 60% of your grammatically bad sentences, but such software is no good at the paragraph level and useless for style considerations. IIRC, Stephen King suggested that the atomic structure

First, just a bit of an overview. Here's the organizing structure I plan to use in this blog. I'll use Episodes to provide some background on what I've tried while struggling to learn the rules of writing commercial speculative fiction. I'm not claiming that these will have been successful tries or that I learned the correct rules. Eventually, Episodes may include very recent events like yesterday. Here and there, I plan to punctuate Episodes with a Summary of rules or writing tips that I think (or once thought) make some sense, but I'll be under no illusion that these apply to everyone. Summaries may also include my take on writing jargon and philosophies. For example, a summary could include the SFWA Nebula award definition for the length of a short story as a story less than 7500 words. Or maybe that also would sneak into an Episode . See. It just did. Eventually, I will blog  Case Studies of stories I've written that have sold, along with m

How far  am I along on the road to writing fame and fortune? This last year, 2011, was a good year. I had 8 speculative short stories accepted, 5 of them at professional rates, and the remaining 3 of them at semi-pro rates. By my count, once all the pro-rate stories are published, I'll be eligible to join the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA)--makes me feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of O z getting a chance to see the guy behind that curtain. I'll discuss the writing and marketing of each of the published stories in other episodes, and I'll discuss the other accepted stories in later posts when they are published. While I was still teaching college mathematics,  I had some publishing credentials in non-fiction: three mathematics textbooks with West (about 1995) and one with McMillan (about 1975). I knew I could write complete sentences and whole paragraphs. After all, my undergraduate major was not just in mathematics, my second major was English l

This is my writing blog. By that, I mean that I've set my goal on being a full-time writer (primarily science fiction and fantasy, but I have other projects in mind), and I plan to document the trials and tribulations here. So think of the episodes as a soap opera, with humor. What does the title of the blog mean? Well, first, it means that I searched the internet and didn't find another blog with that title. Also, No Mongoose in the Mimosa is a short story (sadly as yet unpublished) I wrote, wherein the MC (the Main Character) screws up his romance in Hawaii and then must save his fiance' from a tsunami. Mimosa's are both a tree and a mixed drink. Mongooses were imported to Hawaii to solve another imported problem: rats. It didn't work. Apparently rats are nocturnal beasts and mongooses prefer the daylight. Interestingly, at least to me, a story in a scientific journal from 1917 suggests that a mongoose uses mimosa leaves to treat itself for snak