The other day, I posted on the idea of “widgets” for writers. Here’s an example: a double-widget focused on character development. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been taking a break and reading up on some of the subjects I need to know more about for the remainder of the book I’m working on. Namely, about The South Sea Bubble, early Georgian-era brewing and gin distilling equipment, theory, and practice, and the history of alchemy. Whilst reading up on the last of those topics, I ran across something quite fascinating when it comes to the connections between alchemy and literature, which any lit scholar can …

A while back, I started a series of posts on what I was then calling “Études for Writers.” I think that title is a mistake. I had reasons for choosing the title, of course, which I explained in the first post on the subject: basically, études are special kinds of exercises that marry technique to sensitivity to a theoretical structure. Just about every étude in my book of Ferling “studies” is designed to build specific musical-theoretical structures into your working muscle-memory: the rhythms, the harmonic and melodic structures (and phrasing and articulation) of traditional classical music, and so on: it’s all there. In other words, doing these …