James Piper, Author

Monday, September 17, 2012 Breathe—Verb. To breathe. Breath—Noun. A breath. Breathe Breath Posted 2012/09/17 at 19h17ET in Words , Writing .

Tuesday, September 11, 2012 ON TO—Put the water on to boil, I’m making haggis. ONTO—The cat jumped onto a pillow filled with wrenches. Onto On Posted 2012/09/11 at 19h45ET in Words , Writing .

Sunday, September 9, 2012 CLOTHES—She’s so beautiful. I imagine her without any clothes, but then, her closet and dresser would be empty. CLOTH—A noun. A cloth to wipe up… CLOTHE—Verb. To clothe her doll, she stole… Clothes Cloth Clothe Posted 2012/09/09 at 20h14ET in Words , Writing .

Thursday, September 6, 2012 A homonym. FAIRY—A fairy tale. A fairy godmother. Fairy—not a long, long way to run. FERRY—A boat or ship to transport drunken Swedes back home from Copenhagen. It’s the Danish beer. Fairy Ferry Samantha the Swimming Fairy by Daisy Meadows Evening Ferry by Katherine Towler Posted 2012/09/06 at 5h02ET in Words , Writing .

Sunday, September 2, 2012 Another homonym. TAUGHT—I learned my students? No. I taut my students? No. I teached my students? No. I taught my students. Ah, maybe. TAUT—The trapdoor of the scaffold gave way and the hangman’s noose went taut. Taught Taut What Barbie Taught Me about Wearing a Plastic Smile by Riley Wilkinson A Taut Rope by Fred L. Cook Posted 2012/09/02 at 10h19ET in Words , Writing .

Sunday, August 30, 2012 A homonym that trips some up. WINE—Red wine goes well with kumquats and prickly pears. WHINE—Okay. They don’t pair. Stop your whining. Wine Whine Wine of Violence: A Medieval Mystery (Medieval Mysteries) by Priscilla Royal No Whine With Dinner: 150 Healthy Kid-Tested Recipes from the Meal Makeover Moms by Liz Weiss, Janice Newell Bissex Posted 2012/08/30 at 20h12ET in Words , Writing .

Sunday, August 26, 2012 Easy to miss this one. LICENCE—Always a noun. He has a licence to collect alien spaceships. British spelling variation. LICENSE—A noun. A verb. U.S. spelling variation for noun. The federal Bureau for Interplanetary Affairs is empowered to license individuals, corporations and charities. Licence License Licence to Kill by John Gardner Artistic License by Julie Hyzy Posted 2012/08/26 at 18h24ET in Words , Writing .

Wednesday, August 22, 2012 Easy to miss this one. THROW—Transitive verb. You throw something. A book, your voice, a planet. THROE—A noun. Emotions. Spasms. In the extreme. The throes of love, of battle, of using a computer. throe Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877 by Walter A. Mcdougall Posted 2012/08/21 at 14h48ET in Words , Writing .

Tuesday, August 21, 2012 I don’t make these things up. FLOW—Some like it when champagne flows, others when it’s beer. Water flows down hills and in rivers, but there are no ice flows. FLOE—An ice floe. Chucks of ice floating in water. Big chunks, the size of a city, are called ice fields. DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Canada National Geographic Guide to the National Parks of Canada Posted 2012/08/21 at 14h27ET in Words , Writing .

Monday, August 20, 2012 This one never tripped me up. Not sure why. It should have. COLOMBIA—Country in northern South America. Shares a border with Panama connecting South America with Central America. COLUMBIA—Not a country. Colombia - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture by Kate Cathey One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez Posted 2012/08/20 at 13h39ET in Words , Writing .

Sunday, August 19, 2012 ... When you're on your deathbed, will you cherish all the time you spent watching TV? ... I n 2007, after a lifetime of watching of TV, I stopped watching. My habit was like any, like smoking or drinking. It was just something I did. No real thought about not watching. When I decided to stop, I went cold turkey. I had many weak moments in January and February 2007 but I eventually broke the habit. Whatever urge I had to turn on the TV completely vanished and I haven’t looked back. But how could I? When I mention to people I don’t watch TV, they are incredulous or think I’m nuts. Well, it is true. I don’t watch TV and perhaps I am nuts but I have my reasons. I had known co-workers and friends who had turned off TV completely. I read about journalists and writers who did the same and I always thought they were a touch nuts but then I read Stephen King’s book On Writing. In it he says, and I paraphrase, if you want to write novels, what the hel...

Sunday, August 19, 2012 Similar words that can cause confusion. Me included. ECUADOR—Country on northwest coast of South America. Includes the Galapagos Islands. EQUATOR—Zero degree latitude. Splits northern and southern hemispheres. The equator runs through Ecuador. Frommer's Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands by Eliot Greenspan The Rough Guide to Ecuador by Melissa Graham, Harry Ades Posted 2012/08/19 at 12h59ET in Words , Writing .

Friday, August 17, 2012 ... using a real life character to write a narrative about what could happen ... A couple of years ago I read an article on Julian Assange in The New Yorker. At the time, he was a minor celebrity. Times have changed. Today he garners headlines all over the world. Most know something about him. To some he’s a hero. To others he’s a villain. I’m not here to take sides; I’m here to analyze the narrative aspects of his current situation. In other words, use what we know to write the next chapter of the story—create a political thriller if you will, one that could even include plots for assassination. Hey, I’m making it up and want to create suspense. At the moment he’s holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, England. The Swedes want him on a criminal investigation. There’s an INTERPOL arrest warrant. The British have agreed to extradite him to Sweden. He has lost all appeals with British courts. If it weren’t for the protection provided by Ecuador and ...

Monday, June 11, 2012 ... have you been accused of misspelling a word you know is correct ... S usanne O’Leary wrote an interesting article on her experience with the variations of the English language in different countries. You know the obvious ones like colour with or without a “u” but less obvious ones like travelled versus traveled. Growing up in Sweden she learnt English in school—the UK variation. In publishing her books, she read reviews where she was criticized for improper spelling. False accusations as it turns out. While I write tire and cozy, it’s not incorrect to write tyre or cosy. Same language. Both accepted. Just different. You can read her write-up here along with the numerous comments posted by readers. I found it interesting, but that’s me. As a Canadian I deal with this issue everyday. I feel her pain when she’s criticized for something based on ignorance. No fun. I was told by a boss that “data are” isn’t correct. It should be “data is.” Read...

Thursday, October 13, 2011 ... don't expect to read sex scenes in my novels ... H ere’s the first indie-book linked with my novel. The link? Someone bought my book and the novel Fifth Avenue by Christopher Smith. I read some of the reviews because I wasn’t familiar with either the book or author. No surprise with a self-published author. It’s hard to know what to think about a book when I see such wide variety in opinion, but one theme of the criticism centred on the author’s sex scenes. It disturbed some. I haven’t read the book so I can’t comment on the content, but I can make a general statement on sex scenes in novels and specifically thrillers. As a reader, it’s not why I read and don’t want to read them. I will skip over them. Call me a prig, fine, but I’m not interested. Since I don’t want to read such scenes, I don’t write them. You won’t find any sex scenes in The Protectors. None. Nor is there any coy romance going on between our hero Baird Carr and his si...

Wednesday, October 12, 2011 ... reading anonymous reviews of my writing is something new to me ... I Ten years ago when I told my mother I was writing a novel, she scoffed. “Oh, please. You can’t write a novel. You haven’t read enough!” That was before she read the draft. When she finished reading it, her face was filled with shock and joy. Stunned, I suppose. She was saying: that was good, better than so-and-so, you can write, I take it back. Having read all her life, she’s a good judge of what works and doesn’t work, but it’s my mother. All mothers, well, they lie. They give you that pleasant, warm smile and lie straight to your face. Unless they are particularly angry in the moment. Then you’re likely to hear a multitude of truths. Not much help in gauging where I’m at as writer with this novel. I certainly couldn’t put that in a query letter. Guess what, dear agent, my mother loved it. Yawn. Burn the letter. Pass me the disinfectant. From there, I allowed some f...

Saturday, October 8, 2011 ... what is the best way to start your novel ... C ount them. One. Two. I downloaded two thriller e-books from amazon.com, both published by the author, and they both started the same way: the character waking up and going about some morning ritual. Both books were in the top 100 bestsellers of Mystery & Thrillers Fiction. Both had many positive reviews. Those facts seemed encouraging, but once I read the opening scene, I stopped. I did not continue. But James that seems harsh? Perhaps, yes, but the writer is sending a signal with such an opening. It says, I have more to learn about writing thrillers for today’s audience. Why do I say that? Because a waking-up scene is mundane. It’s ordinary. It happens to us everyday. We don’t read thrillers for the mundane and ordinary. We read them for the extraordinary. We read them to live vicariously through the characters. We read them to be entertained. There is nothing in those waking-up scenes th...

Saturday, September 17, 2011 ... guns and thrillers go hand in hand ... Y ou don’t need to write about guns to create an effective thriller, but it’s clear many thrillers include them for all the obvious reasons. What’s also clear, is if you write about guns and firearms in a way that is not consistent with experts in the field, you’ll hear about it. For example, don’t ever write a revolver has a silencer. It won’t work. Reviews on amazon.com frequently point out factual errors. So, unless you can strip and reassemble a pistol blindfold in ten seconds like those movie scenes, unless you can name all the parts of a handgun, know the terminology, you should avoid writing about them or, in my case, do some research. My background with firearms is limited as in non-existent. No job or training ever exposed me to them. Sure I’ve seen them in movies and on TV, but they never run out of “bullets” and reading about weapons is different than watching them. 1. Courses, Clubs ...

Thursday, March 25, 2010 ... where do the good ideas come from? ... H ere's a quote from someone's Facebook wall, Just when I think of a great script idea...I search and find out it is already 'in production' for 2012! I know the feeling. I once started work on a story only to plop a DVD into the player and discover the story I started, the great idea I molded, was already a movie and before that a successful novel in hardcover. Ugh! There was no point continuing with the same idea because it had been done--even though I had thought it up on my own--it didn't matter. I had to move onto another premise, another idea. After I soaked in enough frustration from being deflated, I felt better when I realized I had come up with a clever idea for a story and others thought enough it to publish a book and make a feature film. That was something. Much better than no ideas or tired ones. But any idea, clever or derivative, is nothing until it is forme...