prohibition-era
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What Price, Charlie?
Week 5 of the 100-words-per-week Serial Novel (which is technically Flash Fiction) exercise at the Writing Forum has come and gone. Over a month ago, I’m afraid [1]. Still, I owe you the conclusion to my wee story [2]. So, without further ado…
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Construction 101 reprise
It’s Week 4 of the 100-words-per-week Serial Novel (which is technically Flash Fiction) story I’ve been working on in the Writing Forum Exercises I participate in. This week, we addressed the Climax and Resolution of the story typically found in Act III of a 3-Act format and the six prompts to work into the narrative…
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Construction 101
Part 3 of the 5 Part Series on Serial Novels Building a story is a bit like building a house.
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The next 100 words
You might remember from last week that I’m participating in a month-long writing exercise building a short story [1], one-hundred words at a time. Last week, we tackled the introduction: a hundred words to acquaint the reader with the characters, setting, and develop a story question or inciting incident. This week, we move on to…
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Serial Novels
Before television… before radio… many people got their fiction fix via serial novels. [1] This is especially true for Rose in the late 1920s and early 1930s. While radios were getting their start, it wasn’t until the mid-30s that nearly every household could afford one. And since books were expensive and libraries few and far…
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At the Garden
I was reading an article about jazz in the Time-Life special edition on the Roaring Twenties [1] that I recently purchased when I read about a band in Chicago that was tantamount to the rise of that particular music genre. Of course, that got me thinking about my W-I-P, as all things related to that…
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Answer Key
Not many of you played. Still, in all fairness, here’s the answers to the recent Pop Quiz.
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Cheers!
Memorial Day weekend is upon us. And chances are your plans involve an adult beverage. Or two. If that’s the case, how about taking a moment or two to toast the resourceful bootleggers of the 1920s for the cocktail that you’re mixing. After all, it’s because of them (and the fact that their alcohol was…
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Engine Boring Displacem… zzzzz
Oh. Sorry. I dozed off there. Maybe that should be Boring Engine instead of Engine Boring? Research takes you down some interesting rabbit holes (like this little tidbit about housework and good posture) and some not so exciting ones. Engine boring displacement, in case you weren’t sure, falls into the latter. (Unless you’re into NASCAR.)
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By any other name
Not to put too fine a spin on it, but, there’s a lot of jargon for illegal alcohol during Prohibition: hooch, horse liniment, coffin varnish, gigglewater (no, JK Rowling did not invent this term), brown plaid, busthead, moonshine, panther piss, skee, rot gut, white lightening… Well, you get the picture. One thing they have in…