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Thank you to everyone who read my short story. I plan to do many more in the near future. In fact, I hope to be in the process of writing one each week. But first things first.

I took a creative writing course at Solano Community College in Fairfield, California, and was blessed to have such a wonderful instructor in Dr. Laurie Duesing. She had a special talent for critique--a balanced blend of encouragement and constructive criticism. I started her class with the vague idea that I wanted to write, and ended with a passion that has sustained me since. All writing students are asked to keep a journal, but not many succeed. The task becomes odious and is eventually dropped. Even Dr. D. told me once that she doesn't keep up on hers like she should. Enter the blog.

I believe the blog will be the writing student's journal of the future, if it is not already employed today. A blog with a following, no matter how small, must be maintained and be somewhat interesting to attract and keep vistors. Teachers can leverage the oldest form of persuation to keep their students writing: peer pressure. I would write every day regardless*, but my blog friends lift me up--a welcomed and unexpected surprise.

* excluding weekends and holidays, see side panel for details

After Dr. D's writing class, a small group of us decided to press on and get together on our own. It started big and pared down to four with an occasional surprise visitor, but for the most part it boiled down to Toni, Elizabeth, Monica and myself. Elizabeth is an aspiring romance writer and is a successful singer songwriter in the Bay Area, whose talent was obvious from the first piece she read in class. Monica has a frightening grasp of language, and is the only person I've encountered whose prose needs to be dumbed down in order to communicate with the average reader. She is amazing. Toni, my writing buddy, writes from a place deep in her heart. She paints vivid scenes from her childhood and can transport her reader from a desk overlooking Times Square to the back of a wild stallion in a fantasy world. Toni has been published in magazines, and is my number one proponent. She told me in an email recently that I won't become a writer someday--I already am.

As part of being a writer, you have to absorb criticism of your work. Who among us is perfect? Have you ever found it easier to see the flaws in others than in yourself? My writers group didn't pull punches when it came to grammatical errors, and neither did Dr. D. I submitted my story to my wife, who, after reading it, was pleased with the plot but had comments on my wording and sentence structures. She was shy at first, and what wife wouldn't be. Has anyone seen Funny Farm? There is a classic scene where Chevy Chase has written a novel and surprises his wife with the completed manuscript on their anniversary. He makes her read it against her wishes, and she hates it, which is a turning point in their relationship. I have assured my darling wife that I will take it like a big boy, even if the medicine is unflavored.

Dixie Belle, a romance author whose blog I frequent, was kind enough to read my story and offer constructive advice:

Scott: I read it. I like the plot twists. You need to cut some of the adjectives, especially out of the first paragraph. Also break some of the longer sentences into shorter ones, which will make them more effective and quicken the pace. Also be careful with dialogue tags, especially animal sounds.

This is the kind of advice I used to get from my writers group, and especially from Dr. D. I had misgivings about some long sentences, and even about some of the adjectives I used, such as gigantic head. But her reference to dialog tags sent me to Google and to the bookshelf. I found a book by Stephen King, On Writing, that I bought maybe two years ago but never read through. The first section recounted his life, which held my interest fleetingly at best. Yesterday however, I opened to the very page of a discussion on dialog attribution. In a nutshell, dialog attribution refers to words like "said" and "asked." Take this sentence for instance: "Daddy, can I have some ice cream?" asked Jackson. The word asked is a dialog attribution or tag. Some authors would spice my example dialog by replacing "asked" with "pleaded" or "begged." Others avoid such markups. Here is what Stephen King has to say about it:

Some writers (..) shoot the attribution verb full of steroids. The result is familiar to any reader of pulp fiction or paperback original:

"Put down the gun, Utterson!" Jekyll grated.
"Never stop kissing me!" Shayna gasped.
"You damned tease!" Bill jerked out.

Don't do these things. Please oh please.

The best form of dialogue attribution is said, as in he said, she said, Bill said, Monica said. If you want to see this put stringently into practice, I urge you to read or reread a novel by Larry McMurtry, the Shane of dialogue attribution. That looks damned snide on the page, but I'm speaking with complete sincerity. McMurtry has allowed few adverbial dandelions to grow on his lawn. He believes in he-said/she-said even in moments of emotional crisis (and in Larry McMurtry novels there are a lot of those). Go and do thou likewise.

I am reading The Writers Companion as a referesher course on sentence construction, and after that the aforementioned Stephen King book. If I want to be serious, I have to be the master of my craft.

I know there are a few readers of mine that have the same goals, such as Mr. Schprock, Chloe and NYPinTA. Probably Jason and Zombie, and a few others too. I welcome all comments, critical or otherwise, and am willing to do the same in return. That's the only way we are going to get better.