Patterns & a Monster in the Clouds

There is something fundamental in the human mind that inspires us to see patterns everywhere. We see Elvis in a piece of toast, a monster in the clouds and gods & heroes in the stars. There’s no doubt that seeing, and seeking out, patterns was important as we evolved into brainy creatures tapping away at keyboards and organizing and curating everything we experience to share on social media. The pattern-seeking imperative runs deep. Imagine seeing movement in the tall grass and realizing a predator is running toward you or looking up at the night sky and seeing how the constellation
Read More

Soundtrack to the Story

I was daydreaming, enjoying my morning coffee and getting lost in the music at my favorite coffee bar (the Newsbar on University Place) when it occurred to me that, at least for that short period of time, my life had a perfect soundtrack. In films, music sets the mood of a scene, foreshadows the entrance of a pivotal character, warns of danger and fills in the gaps in conversations. In life, it’s unlikely to be perfectly timed, but when it hits right, it’s great. The classic blues playing while I drank my macchiato brought me back to my childhood when
Read More

False Confessions

For a long time, I’ve been fascinated by the phenomenon of false confessions. When I first looked into this, I was dead certain that I would never, under any circumstances, confess to a crime I had not committed. But the more time I spent with this odd, and unfortunate, phenomenon, the less certain I grew. False confessions can be obtained by law enforcement professionals applying pressure to vulnerable individuals or by accepting false confessions offered by delusional people bent on attracting attention. Police in the midst of a high profile investigation must find those “attention seekers” to be frustrating distractions.
Read More

BEWARE of Evil Bloggers!

During my brief holiday break from blogging, I didn’t expect an influx of comments on Candy’s Monsters. So when I saw a comment “pending moderation” I was curious. It turned out to be SPAM, but not ordinary spam. It was EVIL BLOGGER SPAM. It doesn’t surprise me when I get an offer to “increase traffic to my site” by less-than-upfront means. Like the offers for 10,000 Twitter followers (robots one & all), I usually delete these “helpful” comments immediately. But something about this one caught my eye and the more I thought about it the more EVIL it became. Here
Read More

Omniscient Voice or First Person — A Writer’s BIG Choice

Who tells the story and why? One of the fundamental questions for storytellers of all stripes is the question of voice. Is a particular narrative best served by an omniscient voice or will the story be better if it’s told through the point-of-view of an individual character? The first person/third person quandary is a classic dilemma for all fiction authors. This is one of those fundamental storytelling questions that can, and will, make or break an individual manuscript. I doubt that THE GREAT GATSBY would be a classic if Fitzgerald had used an omniscient narrator to tell the poignant story.
Read More

Queen of the Movies — What Lurks Behind Her Faded Glory?

Queen of the Movies is the story inspired by the winning idea in the Candy’s Monsters Vampire Real Estate Contest…   Queen of the Movies   Her eyes fluttered open. Waking slowly, as always, there was a moment when she caught herself listening for her mother’s voice in the kitchen or for the thumps and clattering chaos of her brothers dressing in the room next door. But then the world would come into focus and Fannie would rise from the plush velvet cushions and listen — just listen — to the world outside and inside her palace. The hum of
Read More

A Real, Real Place or an Imagined Real Place?

I know the title of this post sounds like Lewis Carroll style nonsense, but it’s not. I often set stories in real places. The concrete details of a real location add a context that can make even the most fantastic tales seem more credible. I could write a werewolf chatting up an NYU grad student at McSorley’s Old Ale House — a popular pub in the East Village that has been in business since 1854 — and borrow the bar’s credibility for my incredible story because so many people have either been to the bar or heard of it. In
Read More

A Waiting Game

I gave the completed first draft of my new novel to three readers. Two of them are true naïve readers and one has been reading the draft all along. Now, I’m playing a waiting game and I hate it. I know that distance — in the form of time away from my manuscript — will enable me to see flaws in the storytelling as well as minor mistakes in the text. Distance = Objectivity. I also know that I need the responses of the two “alpha” readers before moving on to my second draft. Critiques, at this stage of the
Read More

Writers’ Resolutions

It’s RESOLUTION TIME! The trick is to make resolutions that are possible to keep. It’s been a long time since I made the “I will get a publishing contract” resolution or the “I will get stories into anthologies and magazines” resolution. These are typical writers’ resolutions and they are dangerous. Why? It’s obvious. You can resolve to finish manuscripts and to submit them, but you can’t resolve to get them published — that’s up to other people. In my humble opinion, and with the disappointment of resolving to make things happen that were entirely outside my control, I aim for
Read More