Great Writing – Fiction Aficionado

Delightful Descriptions

Well, I haven’t had one of these posts for a while, but I finished reading Chris Fabry’s latest release, The Promise of Jesse Woods, yesterday, and found myself chuckling over some of the descriptions and the pithy observations made by the characters. Make sure to watch for my review in the next couple of days! Anyway, if you have ever been involved in choirs or singing – participating or merely observing – or even if you just have a love of music, you will most likely find this description tickles you as much as it tickled me. The context is

1 July 2016

Ordinary Words with Extraordinary Impact

There are some fascinating words in the English language, but sometimes even ordinary words can be used in an unexpected way, and it’s like a snowball hitting you – smack! – in the forehead. See if you can spot the word that did it in this paragraph: As they both prepared for battle, perfect calm settled on the snow and stirred the trees. Lazy white clouds crisscrossed overhead. The serene moment drew out and then curdled to crackling anticipation. The Preacher’s Lady – Lori Copeland I don’t know about you, but I had a visceral reaction when I read

27 February 2016

Wordpainting – Creating the Mood

As an Australian, travelling in Europe is awe-inspiring. Walking into places like Westminster Abbey or Notre Dame, breathing in their history, singing in services that have been taking place in these building since before my own country was fully charted on the world map… It is a deeply visceral experience that I struggle to put into words. In Davis Bunn’s latest release, The Fragment, the main character, Muriel Ross, is offered the opportunity of a lifetime when she is asked to accompany a long-time family friend to Paris in the early 1920s. Her hometown of Alexandria, Virginia, seems ‘trapped in

20 February 2016

Word Painting – The Weight of Sorrow

Sorrow can be a crippling emotion. One of the things I love about good fiction is that it allows us to experience and learn how to process heavy emotions from a ‘safe’ vantage point – one that involves us emotionally without involving us physically. It can also be just plain cathartic. The Feathered Bone is all that and more. I will have a full review up in the next day or so, but I wanted to share one description that elicited a physical response when I read it. With each step my chest caves deeper against my heart. What a

8 February 2016

Word Painting – A Sticky Residue

Have you ever woken up knowing that you had an uncomfortable dream, and then tried to explain it to someone only to find that you really can’t remember any of it – or at least enough of it to actually make sense when you actually try to verbalise it? Now imagine trying to describe that experience in a book. You could try writing something banal like I did just a moment ago, or you could write this: I’d never been one to remember my dreams, but you didn’t have to remember a nightmare to know you’d just had one. The

11 January 2016

Word Painting – Sometimes it’s the Little Words

I love a good metaphor, don’t you? Have a look at this sentence I read recently in the upcoming release The Silver Suitcase by Terrie Todd: She lay awake far too long, trying in vain to push waves of grief back into the vast ocean called Sorrow. There is such a sense of hopelessness embodied in this imagery (especially when it ends the chapter, like it does in this book). You don’t have to have been to a beach to know the impossibility of trying to stop waves from coming to shore; the relentless incursion. But do you notice that

2 January 2016

Smile!

Smiles can be so expressive, can’t they? When we interact with someone, reading their smile plays a significant role in the impression we form of them and the way we interpret what they are saying. For the writer, there are any number of adjectives that can be applied to smiles: wry, embarrassed, half-hearted, coy, smug, gloating. There are also several synonyms for smile, each of which will create a slightly different impression in the reader: grin, beam, leer, smirk. Using the right word or combination of words is important if you’re going to convey the right image and tone to

21 December 2015

Now THIS is romance!

I know, I know. It’s actually fantasy, but it is also a romance in the oldest sense of the term. It is the story of a hero and his quest; a quest that carries both personal and universal significance. I’m talking about Merchant of Alyss, the second book in Thomas Locke’s Legends of the Realm series. The Kindle version will release on 29th December 2015 and the paperback version releases on 5th January 2016. I will have a review of the book up later this week, but I just had to share this scene between Hyam and Joelle. It almost seized

14 December 2015

The power of fiction, the beauty of words, and the God who made us to wield them for His glory.