I lifted up on my elbows to take a look around and get my bearings, but my view was obscured by something stuck on my nose. Further inspection revealed a round bulbous protuberance was indeed stuck to my nose. Undeterred by this odd discovery, I swung my legs over the side of the bed; or attempted to swing my legs over the side of the bed. The activity was hampered by some heavy weight attached to my feet. I bent [...]

I’ve just purchased the Windows version of the popular content management/creation program Scrivener (it also comes in a Mac version). Created by Literature And Latte  You can buy Scrivener for only $40, I got it for $32 with the 20% discount I picked up on the net. You can try this code or google for the latest one if this one no longer works  WORDSWITHJAM  Copy the code and paste it in the appropriate box at check out.  I downloaded [...]

I wrote the following essay that was published in the My Turn section of Newsweek in 1993, but the subject is as relevant today as it was then and bears repeating. You can still read this essay on The Daily Beast online here Not All Bridges Can Be Burned Your Life History Is Your Permanent Record. It Might Be Possible To Redeem It, But You Can’t Shake It. By Judy White Edelson | NEWSWEEK

Teen Wolf     MTVs supernatural teen drama returns with season 2 on Sun.,  June 3rd at 11 pm. You can catch up with an hour long recap of the first season at MTV at this link:  Teen Wolf: Origins Season 2 Trailer Teen Wolf – Full Episodes True Blood will be back with season 5 on HBO Sun. June 10th at 9 pm. This will be the  last season for show creator Alan Ball. Whether there will be a season 6 remains to [...]

I’ve moved my recipe section to its own blog which is a sub blog of JWEwrite. You can still get to the recipe posts from here via the Cooking For One  link at the top of this blog, but you’ll no longer see individual posts on the front page here. You can also access it directly at http://cookingforone.jwewrite.com With this change you’ll now be able to see all the recipe posts in one place featured in the  revolving slider at the top of the page. [...]

A lot of conversation seems to go around in writerly circles about Voice. If you just tell the story, voice will take care of itself. Not everything you write will sound the same. If you are using first person narrative, then the Voice will be the voice of the protagonist or narrator. Your personal voice will be more evident in essays, but shouldn’t be all that evident in main stream non-fiction. It isn’t something you should spend time worrying about or trying [...]

What is the difference between a potboiler and Literary fiction? With a potboiler you create the plot first then plug your characters into that plot. These are the types of stories/novels that lend themselves best to outlines. This doesn’t mean you can’t still create interesting and fully fleshed characters. Don’t think “potboiler” means the story is sub par. That just means that the story is, well, story driven. In a potboiler, story is king. They are usually action driven. Not [...]

No one ever talks about the third phase of life. They talk about old age. Once a woman turns 60 people start talking about incontinence and sagging skin. Walkers, jazzy scooters, motorized wheelchairs, retirement homes and life alert devices. Men on the other hand don’t seem to get shuffled into the corner of irrelevence. They are expected to just keep doing what they have always been doing. Until death parts them from it. This has to do with our youth [...]

Short shorts are relatively easy for me to write, but I notice that there is no hope to get true character development in a short short. Given the brevity of the form, they have to be action oriented in order to tell any sort of story. That’s all well and good in the process of learning to tell a story. But there’s no time to flesh out the characters beyond perhaps eye and hair color. I understand the character’s personality should show up in the dialogue they use [...]

Short Shorts are short stories of 1500 words or less. Since I’m learning to write stories, on my way to writing those novels I’ve had in my head for the past 15 years I’ll be posting some of these as they make their way out of my muddled mind. Hope you like them. Feel free to leave your thoughts. Like em or not. Let me know. Dive Bomb (approximately 600 words)

Pauley and I are best buds. We get together every summer for two whole weeks with our parents at The Aum-Sat-Tat Ranch in San Antonio, Texas. We’d been working on the tree house since we got there and they’d finally said we could sleep in it that night. We climbed up with flash lights and sandwiches and four, four! cokes each. Paul had his binocs. We were using em to look over at the CC to see what the big [...]

People ask when is the best time of the day to write. My answer is, whenever an idea strikes you. You have ideas all the time. You just don’t write them down. Write them down. Even if it amounts to 150 words. That’s about 20 sentences, Nineteen tweets. Maybe you’ll discover that the things you think are essays, or stories, or maybe you think like a critic; maybe you write critiques in your head. How do you talk to yourself [...]

Everything but the Kitchen Sink

Wowza! Smash is super! A real grown up TV series. No vampires. No cops or robbers, No singing high schoolers. You’ll feel like you’re part of something Big as you watch the creation of a new Broadway show.Staring Debra Messing, Jack Davenport, Katharine McPhee, and Anjelica Huston, Smash was a concept originally presented to Showtime’s then entertainment president Robert Greenblatt by Steven Spielberg back in 2009. When Greenblatt moved to NBC in 2011 he brought the project with him. Though the series premiers Monday, February 6th, NBC has released early [...]

House of Lies opens its first season with Gods of Dangerous Financial Instruments. It’s on Showtime and I’ve watched it pre-air. This is very good. Think Mad Men in the 21st century. Though it’s not an advertising agency, it’s a management consulting company. Don Cheadle plays Marty Kaan, who is a cut throat and psychopathic businessmen as you’ll get anywhere. In the first episode he devises the most reprehensible corporate spin to turn public opinion from hate to love while simultaneously screwing John Q [...]

Season 4 of BB finished up this past Sunday and, as usual, it was another shocker. Well, the whole season was one shocker after another. Nobody left season four disappointed, that’s for sure. I won’t tell you what happened in the final episode – but I want to. I really really want to. After watching you may wonder if this is the end of BB. After all, show creator Vince Gilligan has always told us that the show would be finite. It would [...]

When Jesse blew Gail into the next life we all had to sit down and take a minute. That performance earned Aaron Paul an Emmy last year. And this year? Maybe Giancarlo Esposito will be picking up the honors for Breaking Bad. An awesome performance by all cast members in last night’s season 4 episode number 10 which left me screaming. And there are three more episodes this season.

Season 4 is back and I’m telling ya’ these guys have taken a turn for the worse. When BB wrapped up last season we saw a tear drop from Jesse’s left eye when he put the gun to poor – oh heck, I can’t remember his name – you know, the guy hired to take Walt’s place in the lab producing that super strain of meth. So I was expecting recriminations, mad scrambling in the direction of ass saving, perhaps [...]

I’m loving this new SyFy series. Alphas are humans with extraordinary abilities. Notice I said abilities, not powers. Though some of their abilities may seem supernatural, they are people whose brains have developed enhanced capabilities. But, along with the enhanced abilities come some deficits. This is why they are under the care of a neurologist / psychiatrist, Dr. Lee Rosen (David Strathairn), who is an expert in the Alpha phenomena who rides herd over the team while they investigate other Alphas who [...]

Weeds, True Blood 1 and 2 All in one sitting, that was three hours of hilarity and eeek! I love the summer because that’s when all my favority shows air new episodes. Next month Breaking Bad is back and all that seriously puts me in advanced sloth mode. In Weeds first episode Bags Nancy gets booted out of prison, and she’s not at all happy about this fortuitous turn of events. What!? no witness protection?! No, Nancy, we don’t give a flip [...]