Ruminations

Investigating how prompts fuel practice—but hinder momentum in my WIP MADELINE SLOVENZ SEP 05, 2025 I have been thinking about my seeming inability to actually get back to writing scenes and wonder if I’ve become too dependent on the prompts I get as a student of Story Grid Guild. Every other week I eagerly wait for the new assignment to drop. Each new lesson that Shawn Coyne presents is…

Whodunnit? From my 10th floor perch in Chicago, I look out over the treetops of Lincoln Park to Lake Michigan. On the horizon, a tanker inches along—miles away, unidentifiable. A mysterious shadow moving south. Toward Chicago? Gary, Indiana? With one app, I could solve the mystery in seconds: port of origin, destination, speed, even archival photos. Mystery solved, case closed. Not so easy for…

“You’re in the business of creating characters,” a workshop leader at a writing conference once said. I agree I am. No, I’m not an actor, though I have a background in theater and played a few roles on the stage. That was stage one of my growth as a person, no pun intended. Stage one was the first twenty-four years of my adult life when I defined myself as an artist until I went down the rabbit…

Orbiting Jupiter, a review

Photo by Mihail Macri on Unsplash

This page-turner bridges middle-grade and young adult. In his short novel published in 2017, Newberry Honor-winning author professor at Calvin Collge in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Gary D. Schmidt, has created two compelling young protagonists—fourteen-year-old Joseph Brook and twelve-year-old Jack Hurd. I say Orbiting Jupiterbridges these two audiences, not…

Jeremiah’s Best Trick

Jeremiah was a natural. His mother said it was in his genes because his great-grandfather William “Mush” Rawls had been a famous vaudeville actor with Buster Keaton in the early 1900s. But Great-grandfather Mush was not so famous that any of Jeremiah’s classmates had ever heard of him. No, Jeremiah had to make a name for himself on his own.

Take a Short Fiction Break and read “Jeremiah’s Best…

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Here’s your first sneak peek at a thriller short story I’m working on that features an 18-year-old recent high school graduate who gets into some serious trouble while working at a sleep-away summer camp . . .

Crystal drove around the Pine Barrens in Charlie’s red Jeep Cherokee for hours, in a blind panic. Tell someone what happened to Charlie, or stick…

The journey to self-publishing and launching my first short story has been an interesting one, to say the least. Eight weeks ago, I started taking an online class called Write to Publish with the good folks at The Write Practice. We started out in early April by making our websites, so we would have a platform to share our writings and find subscribers.

Then, behind closed doors in the privacy…

Mixing Art and Sales to Concoct the Magic Elixir To Ensure that the Tree That Falls in the Forrest is Heard

Have you ever wanted to learn the ways of the infamous snake-oil salesmen of the medicine shows of yore? That’s what it feels like to knock on doors (via email) and stand in the town square (FaceBook, Twitter, and Instagram) to perform my enthusiastic pitch to get people’s attention in order to sell them something they didn’t even know they wanted. Ah, the underbelly of being an artist. Sales!