Sharp, Glittering Things: a fairy tale

by Marta Pelrine-Bacon copyright 2011 Clarice possessed a fascination for sharp, glittering things. In her upstairs room she kept knives, needles, and razors hidden in a red box under her bed. Almost every one of them was stolen. Her mother couldn’t even abide the sight of cutlery and the sight of blood made her faint. …

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Change and Other Cool Things

Publication! My publisher, Plum Tree Books, is launching two children's books that I illustrated! I've been distracted and more unorganized than usual because of a cancer diagnosis and chemo brain, but I'm trying to get my life and my attitude back on track. I'm excited about my publisher's work and I want her books to …

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Belief

Have you ever seen something--a garden gate perhaps, a picture hanging on a cafe wall, an odd, unexpected object in an odd and expected place--that made you stop and look again. That stirred your heart, maybe your gut, a place deep within? I love connecting with a picture, a story, a random object. Imagine if …

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May is here. May is here. Life is stories, and life is fears…

I think the loveliest time of the year is the pub date, I do. Don't you? Course you do! Wait. What? (A gold star to whomever gets the reference in my blog post title.) I'm taking part in Story-a-Day May. Are you? I'll post the stories over at The Fairy Tale Asylum. At the end …

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To Write or Not Write That Sex Scene

Why not fade to black and leave it all to the imagination? The reader's imagination is a great thing and shouldn't be underestimated. The comments on yesterday's post made me think about several issues when deciding whether or not to write a sex scene. I'm no expert at writing such things, so this is mostly …

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