Heroes, Victims, Survivors, Villains

Do you understand the definitions of hero, victim, survivor, and villain? When writing fiction, one needs to be aware of exactly what the definitions of these words are. Who is a hero? According to the dictionary, a hero is a man or woman of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his or her brave deeds…

Conjunctions and Commas

There are enough rules about when to use a comma and when not to use one to drive any normal person insane. Instead of allowing that punctuation mark to drive me to insanity, I decided to give it a more in-depth look. I’m going to examine the use of commas with coordinating and subordinating conjunctions.…

Retaliation – a Review

This is a book that every young adult needs to read.  Retaliation is avenging an injury or wrong a person has done to you by returning some injury or wrong to that person.  Through an engaging story, this book explores how deeply violence exists in many communities and the measures some families will go through…

Adverb Abuse

How can one abuse an adverb?  An adverb isn’t something you can grab hold of and beat up, but you can use them so often in your writing that the person reading your book is traumatized to the point that he wants to throw it across the room.  Seriously?  Adverbs can traumatize? Do an experiment. …