Peg Herring's Page

One problem I face as a mystery writer (and reader) is how smart the protagonist gets to be. Even when I was a kid I knew that Sherlock Holmes was often way off in his self-proclaimed "logical deductions". Saying that a man's wife no longer loves him because his coat has a loose button is beyond ridiculous, and such Holmes moments have been spoofed many times by comedians better at it than I.

But here's the thing with mysteries: writers have to make leaps sometimes to make the story work. The c… Continue

Yesterday I made a crown: four feet at the base, four-and-a-half feet wide at the top, bejeweled, golden, and undeniably tacky. It will definitely be the spectable it's intended to be at the Christmas festivities.

What I always find, no matter what the purpose, is that creating something tangible is relaxing for me. Not that I'm any sort of artist; don't ever think that. I need lots of help to transmit the idea in my head to reality. But I'll work for hours, even days, on such projects with hot… Continue

Writers know what it is, and readers do, too: Too Dumb To Live. It's that moment in a book where a character does something so out of logical bounds that we're thrown out of the story while we scream (silently, one hopes) "No sane person would go into that basement/warehouse/alley/crypt, etc. In the book I'm reading, it is the hull of a ship that's aground in the Arctic Circle. The two men (Double TDTL) rappel into the hold in their street clothes, knowing that a) the ship is sliding off the she… Continue

I'm not really twice as wordy as usual. I'm getting double postings, and I don't know why. I notice some others are too, and Daniel says it will go away soon. I try to delete one if I catch it.

Today's challenge: explain where the ridiculous names used in ads come from. What scientist, in lab coat and black-framed eyeglasses, proclaimed: "We've found a new yogurt culture, and we're going to call it bifidus regularis!"

Here's one I used to use with my students to get past the I-can't-write-poetry defense.

A noun (in this case your current protagonist)
4 adjectives describing the noun
A phrase
A noun related to the original noun

Here's mine:
Simon,
Callow, curious, virtuous, brave,
Loyal as the day is long,
Sleuth.