Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Conversations with Calliope


JOE: Good morning Calliope.
CALLIOPE: Good morning Joe. What's going on today?
JOE: Just being careful not to become part of one of the car accidents I passed on the way to my office this morning. I saw two, one almost right in front of my house.
CALLIOPE: Glad you are safe. Tell me about yesterday.
JOE: I started on the next chapter of Marital Property, where Denis is pondering the blowup at dinner and wondering what happened. Cynthia stormed off to the bedroom, and I expect to hear from her a little later. Last night at the Lift Bridge Writers Group, I read chapters 3 and 4. I had not looked at either since I wrote them. I received some nice comments about phrasing as well as some excellent suggestions for changes.
CALLIOPE: For example?
JOE: I have a thing about conversation tags. I don't like them. However some of my dialogue was not clear as to who was speaking.
CALLIOPE: How will you address that?
JOE: I will work on it when I get to the editing process. What I have done before is to include something in the conversation which makes it clear who is talking or else add some description which points to the speaker.
CALLIOPE: Sounds good to me. Do you think it worked before?
JOE: I was happy with it in my dialogue in The Pastor's Inferno.
CALLIOPE: What's up for today?
JOE: I am presenting a workshop at the Genesee County Mental Health Association tomorrow on Writing for the Soul. I need to polish it and make some selections to demonstrate different kinds of writing. I have done just about every type of writing except poetry. I plan to use this as a road show instead of book readings. Hopefully it will turn out well. Tomorrow is my debut.

(Moorish Castle-Gibraltar)

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