Anne Woodland

       Grief is a strange thing. You are going about your life and then suddenly this aching just slaps you in the face. I woke up recently with a strong desire to hear my mother play The Entertainer by Scott Joplin. It was my favorite piece to listen to her play, and she was usually willing to take requests, as long as she wasn't in the middle of rehearsing for a performance.       The thing is, when she passed her quality of life was already so diminished that even if she were still alive now I still wouldn't be able to listen to her playing such a complicated piece, if she were able to play anything at all. Everything that I miss the most about my mom was already gone before she died.       I distinctly remember visiting my parents for Easter two years before she passed. I was four or five months pregnant with my oldest and one night I just broke down sobbing to my husband because I realized that no matter how things progres...

       I read a lot, and since around 2014 the majority of what I've read has been in Ebook form. The great thing about the explosion of Ebooks and other forms of digital publication is that it's made getting your work seen a lot more accessible to writers. There are a number of authors who self-publish whose work I actively anticipate. In fact, I would say my current favorites publish this way.      However, I do think one problem that isn't properly recognized about self-publishing is that you don't always get as many eyes on your work in the early stages, which can lead to pitfalls like pattern writing. What do I mean by that? Well, I have examples.       There are two different writer's who've done fairytale retellings, which is a genre I really enjoy, particularly if they're doing one of the lesser known fairytales. After I read the first book by each of the authors, I quickly purchased their next one... and it was basically th...

       It's interesting how life is constantly trying to teach you things if you let it, especially about yourself. In recent years I've discovered a lot about my inner workings. The most recent thing I've realized is that I am way too prone to independence.      To clarify, I do think some level of independence is a good thing, but it's also important to know when to ask for help or when to collaborate, and that is, apparently, a skill I do not possess. Some of that might be due to the fact that I was the second of seven children, so independence was quite a useful life skill growing up.  That being said, I do think most of my issue stems from the fact that in most situations asking for help literally does not occur to me. My instinct is to research and fixate until I figure it out or give up for an extended period of time, and while I do ask questions, I rarely explicitly ask for help. Also, on the odd occasions when it does occur to me to ask, ...

      One of the difficult things about writing, at least for me, is how much of myself I put into my characters. That's not to say that all my characters are the same, although undoubtedly they have some commonality. Rather my characters are expansions on aspects of myself. Or even a sort of experiment on an emotion that I experienced but didn't dwell on. They're "what ifs".  What if I had a different background? What if my temperament was completely different? What if I was someone else?     Now obviously, you have to build on the foundation of that "what if" concept and by the time you're finished you'll hopefully have a decent character. It's a rather interesting and often surprisingly introspective exercise in imagination. The dangerous part is how vulnerable it makes you feel.  Not only are your characters your brain children, they're reflections of yourself. You love them and you want other people to love them and see them as you d...

     I look at nature and I am amazed at how balanced it is.  The life cycles of the various food pyramids feed each other and keep each other in check. It speaks to me of perfect, omniscient creation. It's not until humans involve themselves, directly or not, that things frequently fall out of harmony. And I think that speaks to the reality that humans are something more than just animal.       We certainly have a great deal of commonality with animals. We share quite a bit of DNA. The basic components that create us are pretty consistent across the board, at least for vertebrates. We have most of the same organs in quite similar placement, same general large bones, although the specific layout varies a bit. We share a lot of basic brain chemistry and instincts. Humans are animals, but we aren't just animals.     Humans aren't just animals because no other animal has the ability to both create and destroy on the scale of magnitude that ...

      Good storytelling requires two things: firstly, you need the audience to be interested in the story you're telling. Secondly, you have to keep them interested. The particulars on how to do so vary a bit genre to genre.  However, one of the most effective ways to lose an audience's interest is to tell them things you aren't showing them.      What do I mean by that? Well, for example, say I'm watching a movie and five or ten minutes in the main character is described as "caring too much", but everything I've been shown about this character makes them seem flighty, immature, attention seeking, and a bit self-righteous. Now as an audience member, I'm immediately distrustful of anything I'm told going forward. Admittedly, Edger Allan Poe does an amazing job using the "tell something not shown" concept rather ironically in "Tell Tale Heart", so it is possible to tell a compelling narrative like that, but only if you're tryi...