Only Today and Tomorrow

by

In Today’s Journal

* Quotes of the Day
* Only Today and Tomorrow
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

Quotes of the Day

“Write the slow parts fast and the fast parts slow.” Lee Child on pacing

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity.” Ray Bradbury

“… knowing when to hit Enter can take your writing from meh to manuscript-ready.” Lori Freeland in “The Power of Paragraphing” (see Of Interest)

Given my post from yesterday, how’s that last quote for coincidence?

Only Today and Tomorrow

left to write and submit a story for the Echoes of Chandler contest.

  • You don’t have to mimic Raymond Chandler’s voice or style or even stick to his genre. Any genre is welcome.
  • I’ll be looking (as always) for stories that grab me at the hook and opening, pull me to depth in the story, and keep me there to the end.
  • The best tool to use to pull a reader into the story is description. Raymond Chandler was a master at description. That’s the tie-in with Chandler.

One famous west-coast police procedural crime writer (I forget his name at the moment) said in a video interview that before he begins writing a new book, he always reads Chandler’s description of Los Angeles in The Little Sister.

Metaphor and simile are excellent tools to use in vivid description. They bring the description home to a wider variety of readers. Here are a few examples:

“It got very quiet. The kind of quiet that presses right down on top of you before the first crack of lightning in a summer storm; hot and airless and bitter tasting on your tongue.” Lloyd in The Cowboy and the King, a novel by KC Riggs

“Mark’s movements were abrupt, sharp. The few words he spoke had a hard, whining edge, like the sound of a table saw touching metal.” from a novel by Margherita Gale Harris

“These were deep itches, like nerve endings having panic attacks.” Narrator in Lydia’s Awakening, a novel by Susan DeBow

“The mist shuffled ahead of the train until it covered the bushes like shredded bed sheets.” Narrator in Mirror Image, a memoir by Wendy Green

Talk with you again soon.

Of Interest

The Power of Paragraphing

A Look At 13 Years Ago

Make Friends, Make Money

7+ Best Grammarly Alternatives for Writers in 2025 You probably don’t need Grammarly or any of these alternatives. Read your work aloud. Grammarly aborted any chance of me championing them when, in an ad, they mentioned that a run-on sentence is “a really long sentence.” That is not true, and it only proved their ignorance of, um, grammar and syntax.

The Numbers

The Journal…………………………… 430

Writing of Blackwell Ops 47: Sam Granger | Special Duty

Day 1…… 3250 words. To date…… 3250

Fiction for August..………………….. XXXX
Fiction for 2025………………………. 526647
Nonfiction for August………………… 430
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 168830
2025 consumable words…………….. 687863

2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 13
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 31
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 117
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 301
Short story collections……………………. 29

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Questions are always welcome at harveystanbrough@gmail.com. But please limit yourself to the topics of writing and publishing.