Kathy Brasby Blog

Keeping all the people happy

Very early in my writing career, I learned to dread Thursdays.  In those days, I worked as the editor of a small weekly newspaper in a rural community that knew not only everyone's name, but how they were related to one another and who had dated in high school. Our...

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Speaking to write

If you write at all and own an iPad or iMac, the dictation feature is enough reason to upgrade to the Mountain Lion operating system if you haven't yet. What dictation offers you is writing without typing. In general terms, when using any program where you would...

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Don’t say butterball

Summer softball games in the cool of the evening provided the best gathering place for a small town with limited entertainment choices. You could watch TV summer reruns, hang out at the local bar or take in the games. So we gathered in the wooden bleachers to watch...

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Writing on the cloud

My first computer was an Apple II and I sprung for the newest innovation: two disk drives. In those days, there were no hard drives and, in a sense, saving data was simpler. Your program was one disk and the data on the second. It was easy to save a file to yet a...

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Why I quit talking to answering machines

To understand this story, you need to know about July heat in northeast Colorado, when the temperatures would melt dashboards and western skies flexed purple and green while threatening hail.  I worked at a farm implement dealership that year, in the middle of...

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Which character?

Thanks to a couple of star-gliding teenagers, our family has been lured into watching the most current Doctor Who television series from BBC.  Doctor Who is a science fiction series, continuing on and off since the 1960's, about a Time Lord who is able to cross time...

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An easy writer’s tool

A smartphone is a gift to writers and here's another reason why. We had just finished a guitar-led round of folk songs for the local nursing home when Mary turned to me. "Remember the old cassette tape recorders? That sure would be helpful when we learn new songs. We...

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Finding characters

I love a good story as well as any one and a good character is even better. So let me tell you about Barney. Just for the record, I have changed his name although he's passed on now. I worked with him over 20 years ago. I was still trying to get life figured out and...

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Pie Heritage

If it weren't for apple pie, I'm pretty sure I would have been a high school dropout and begun a checkered career involving recycled bicycle parts and horseshoes. But that's a story we won't have to write because my mother was an ace pie baker. None of this thawing a...

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