Lyrical Pens: MobileWritersGuild

Showing posts with label MobileWritersGuild. Show all posts

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Mobile Literary Festival

cj Sez: For readers and writers: Mark your calendars and

SAVE THE DATE. . . March 23, 2024 . . .

for an upcoming one-day reader and writer event—The Mobile Literary Festival at Mobile’s Ben May Library in conjunction with the Mobile Writers Guild. Published authors will present panels on character development, setting, marketing, and plotting. You can also purchase a book and have it signed by the author! And best of all, this amazing literary festival is FREE.

For more information, click this link:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/MobileLiteraryFestival/

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Here’s a perspective I hadn’t thought of, though I’d like to think this truth was swirling around somewhere in the back of my mind: “Mystery, thriller, and suspense (MTS) stories are the villain’s story, as told and perceived by the protagonist.”

Author and book coach Samantha Skal dives into ideating twists that work when writing thriller and mystery stories. To read more of her post on Jane Friedman’s blog, click the link here: https://janefriedman.com/designing-thriller-and-mystery-twists-that-work/

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I know, I know. The first day of spring is about two months away in the Northern Hemisphere, but I’m antsy so I wanted you to know that U.S. and Canadian Coast Guard ice cutters are getting ready to clear the shipping lanes in the Great Lakes.

Makes me feel happier already. On Thursday, Jan. 18, 2024, the U.S. Coast Guard announced the annual onset of icebreaking in the lower Great Lakes. According to their press release, they gave the task the tongue-in-cheek name of Operation Coal Shovels. The picture (left) shows U.S. Coast Guard icebreakers in operation as seen from the cutter Mackinaw.

(On a side note re the cutter Mackinaw: The name of the five-mile-long “Mighty Mac” bridge connecting Michigan’s peninsulas is spelled Mackinac yet still pronounced “mackinaw.” The Mackinac spelling is from the Mackinac Bands of Chippewa and Ottawa Indians. a state recognized tribe of Ojibwe and Odawa Native Americans who called the area Michilimackinac.
The Mackinac Bridge

The spelling was shortened to Mackinac and pronounced “Mackinaw” by the French who settled in the area. That’s my Googled history lesson for the day.)

All those wintery-gray months of ice and snow helped convince me to move from Michigan to the Gulf Coast, and what a difference 1,200 or so miles makes.

The picture (left) is of about 50 feet of my side yard in Mobile. Son Jeff took the photo last February.

I’m hoping for the same kaleidoscope of color this year (“hoping” because we suffered a severe summer drought).

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Okay, that’s it for today. You-all guys keep on keeping on, and I’ll try to do the same. Raising prayers for a happy and safe you and yours.

Now some words from my sponsors:

Buy Valentine’s Day Now Buy Mardi Gras Now

Available! Two Mobile Writers Guild anthologies filled with wonderful short stories and poems to celebrate upcoming special days. Mardi Gras season is alive and well in Mobile, with parades and moon pies bringing crowds to downtown streets. Laissez les bons temps rouler

Also for your to-be-read stack: My novels, THE DAWGSTAR and DEATH ON THE YAMPA are fast-paced, thriller/suspense stories with sassy banter and a touch of romance. The books are available on Amazon or through your favorite eTailer and bookstore. Got a library card? You can read the ebooks free from Hoopla.

The Haunted Book Shop has signed copies of my paperback books in stock. TO ORDER, contact: https://www.thehauntedbookshopmobile.com/contact-us

If they happen to be sold out, shoot me an email. I have a small stash available for a discounted price plus shipping.

➜ Follow me on . . .

➜ Amazon: Amazon Central Author Page

➜ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CjPettersonAuthor

➜ BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/cj-petterson

➜ Goodreads: https://bit.ly/3fcN3h6

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Welcome back to Lyrical Pens in 2024

cj Sez: I hope your December holiday celebrations were wonderful, and you made many lovely memories. Now, as Draft2Digital told me in a recent email: “It’s time to soar in 2024!”

I want to continue my last contronym post with just a few more examples from the article “40 Words and Phrases That Are Their Own Opposites” by Judith Herman.

14. Clip Clip can mean “to bind together” or “to separate.” You clip sheets of paper to together or separate part of a page by clipping something out. Clip is a pair of homographs, words with different origins spelled the same. Old English clyppan, which means “to clasp with the arms, embrace, hug,” led to our current meaning, “to hold together with a clasp.” The other clip, “to cut or snip (a part) away,” is from Old Norse klippa, which may come from the sound of a shears.

15. Continue usually means “to persist in doing something,” but as a legal term it means “to stop a proceeding temporarily.”

16. Fight with can be interpreted three ways. “He fought with his mother-in-law” could mean “They argued,” “They served together in the war,” or “He used the old battle-ax as a weapon.” (Thanks to linguistics professor Robert Hertz for this idea.)

17. Flog, meaning “to punish by caning or whipping,” showed up in school slang of the 17th century, but now it can have the contrary meaning, “to promote persistently,” as in “flogging a new book.” Perhaps that meaning arose from the sense “to urge (a horse, etc.) forward by whipping,” which grew out of the earliest meaning.

18. Go means “to proceed,” but also “give out or fail,” i.e., “This car could really go until it started to go.”

19. Hold up can mean “to support” or “to hinder”: “What a friend! When I’m struggling to get on my feet, he’s always there to hold me up.”

20. Out can mean “visible” or “invisible.” For example, “It’s a good thing the full moon was out when the lights went out.”

21. Out Of Out of means “outside” or “inside”: “I hardly get out of the house because I work out of my home.”

22. Toss Out Toss out could be either “to suggest” or “to discard”: “I decided to toss out the idea.”

23. Peer Peer is a person of equal status (as in a jury of one’s peers), but some peers are more equal than others, like the members of the peerage, the British or Irish nobility.

24. Original According to Dictionary.com, original can mean either “belonging to the beginning of something” or “new, fresh, inventive.”

That’s it for this thread on Lyrical Pens. To read the rest of the article, click on this link and enjoy: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/57032/25-words-are-their-own-opposites

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For writers and readers: The link below is to a recent article on Jane Friedman’s blog directed to writers, but I think there are some clues in there that would serve any parent of a teen well: https://janefriedman.com/4-things-every-ya-writer-should-know-about-teens/

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Okay, that’s the post for today. You-all guys keep on keeping on, and I’ll try to do the same. Raising prayers for a happy and safe you and yours.

Now some words from my sponsors:

Available! Two Mobile Writers Guild anthologies with a variety of wonderful short stories and poems to celebrate upcoming special days. (P.S The city of Mobile, Al, has already started Mardi Gras celebrations.)

Buy Valentine’s Day Now Buy Mardi Gras Now

My novels, THE DAWGSTAR and DEATH ON THE YAMPA are fast-paced, thriller/suspense stories with sassy banter and a smidgen of romance. The books are available on Amazon or through your favorite eTailer and bookstore. Got a library card? You can read the ebooks free from Hoopla.

The Haunted Book Shop has a few signed copies of my paperback books in stock. TO ORDER, contact: https://www.thehauntedbookshopmobile.com/contact-us If the shop happens to be sold out, shoot me an email. I have a small stash (with a discounted price plus shipping).