That was the topic of my part of Trick Question's talk last night. Here are my slides (revised today). Not Trick Question's slides, because they aren't mine.

Why Do People Like Sad Stories?

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I finally rewrote the final chapter of "The Magician and the Detective", taking into account Karen Joy Fowler's critique. (I changed the tea references in chapters 8 and 10 to lavender tea, to remove any doubt

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Earlier this week I was trying to list great and famous examples of different types of stories. When I came to romance, I realized that none of the stories that seemed most romantic to me were romances.

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Back in, gee, November 2014, you won me a review from Karen Joy Fowler by giving over $1000 to help fund Clarion, the famous science fiction & fantasy writers' workshop I went to back when I was your age still older than you, which I keep encouraging you to apply to and none of you ever apply to.

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Mysteries. Everybody thinks they know what they are. I’m beginning to think maybe no one does.

Scholastic’s genre chart says:

Purpose: To engage in and enjoy solving a puzzle. Explore moral satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) at resolution. Consider human condition and how to solve or avoid human problems.

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That Princeton fan-fiction course that covered "The Magician and the Detective" finally posted my interview on their blog… 2 weeks after the course ended, so nobody read it.  But you can!  It was posted here, but no point going there.  You can’t leave comments there, and the slightly-improved version is right here:

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...or at least I'm part of the English curriculum at Princeton. Anne Jamison's course, "Fanfiction: Transformative Works from Shakespeare to Sherlock", will cover "The Magician and the Detective" on March 4. Thanks to Murcushio for telling me.

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I tried to refer back to my blog post on Scene & Sequel, and found out I’d never written it. So here it is.

Dwight Swain wrote a book about 50 years ago called “Techniques of the Selling Writer” which says your book must be comprised of units with the “Scene-Sequel” structure. This is the same scheme you’ll find in Jack Bickham’s Scene & Structure. The Scene-Sequel structure looks like this:

SCENE

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I read all the comments on all my stories, eventually, but I'm behind now. Friday was Bad Horse Day, what with "Moments" and "The Twilight Zone" in the featured box, my Royal Canterlot Library interview site post, and continuing blog-post fallout. I had over 500 notifications over the past 3 days, and about 20 new watchers. Axis of Rotation cleverly managed to be #800.

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