Her last post. Your job? Say #GoodbyeToo @ SCVincent

Sue’s wisdom will live long after she has left us. RIP Sue we will miss you.

Barb Taub

Today Sue Vincent shared what may be her last blog post. It’s so like Sue that it’s a message of hope as well as gentle regret.

Sue has given so much and so freely—to family, friends, and uncounted thousands she’s touched online. This post of loss and love is deeply personal. But it’s also universal. The world has faced loss and grief on an unprecedented scale over the past year. Sue is part of that pandemic recording. It might not be the coronavirus that ultimately beats her (a far older and even more egalitarian cancer will be credited with that victory) but it played a lead role in delaying treatment which might have bought time.

So here’s my challenge. Please share this post. Please share a tweet and add names of those you’ve lost this past year. Because the world needs to remember every loss, every person whose death was…

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Story Resolutions: Mastering the Happy-Sad Ending – by Gilbert Bassey…

A great blog as I related it to A Year in the Life of Leah Brand as I didn’t want the usual tie up soppy happy ending but to leave the reader wondering. Did I do right or wrong? Who knows but it bothered a lot of people. The answer is in book 2, if you’fre curious. 🙂

Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog

on Writers Helping Writers:

It was 10pm, and I was trying to sleep when my door flew open and my sister came in, wailing like a wounded puppy. “Why did you kill him?”

I cleared the sleep from my eyes. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Michael! You killed Michael!”

At that, I couldn’t help myself from laughing. Not a nice thing, I know.

Curiously, she went ahead to profess love for the story—particularly the ending that made her cry. Fascinating, right? My story was able to create such a strong emotional reaction because it avoided the safety of a happy ending and the depression of a sad ending. Instead, it opted for the more fulfilling happy-sad resolution.

Why Happy-Sad Endings?

Before we answer the question of why, let’s explore the story endings that we commonly see. To put it bluntly,

  • A sad ending is when the story ends…

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We’ve Got Mail—Nice, Nasty, and Just Plain Nutty. Writers Review Readers – by Ruth Harris…

Thoughts from the early days – two excellent articles.

Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog

on Anne R. Allen:

My encounters with reader mail go back a long way. My first job as a very young editor at Bantam included slogging through the slush pile and answering reader mail. No internet or email those days. Everything was done the old fashioned way — by hand.

I’ve written before about my adventures in the slush pile.

Reader mail was an entirely different learning curve. Generic mail received a polite form letter thanking the sender for his/her interest. Letters from readers wanting to contact writers were forwarded to the writer’s agent who would take it from there.

We received quite a bit of mail from prisoners whose return address included the name of the prison and the prisoner number. Without omnipresent TV and certainly no WIFI, reading was their main source of diversion. I responded via the usual form letter thanking them for their interest, and…

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Mayhem, Maria, & Music

Amazon

Three Against The World started life as a book my “cover girl” Maria, would be allowed to read. In a word, clean. It came before lockdown, but here she is, two years on, taking her “daily exercise”.

Maria’s mother dumped her on Richard’s doorstep claiming he was her father, and he didn’t tell Maria when he found out it was a mistake. Ben would never have forgiven him if he’d lost her.

Ben is the Jack Russell Terrier Richard adopted from a rescue centre and he is modelled on my own rescued Weimaraner. Not that she bites… or she hasn’t yet, but nobody has threatened me. It is she who taught me how clingy dogs who lose their homes can be. Even now, almost 6 years on, she values routine and gets scared if someone is missing for a few hours, and the only place she can be left…

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