Time as a Story Element ~ Setting, Tone, Atmosphere, & Urgency

🙂 NaNoWriMo coming soon. 🙂

Elizabeth Fais

National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO) is just around the corner—a yearly event in which writers commit to completing a 50,000 word (or more) novel during the month of November. One month. One book. Not a lot of time. So, time as a story element seems like an appropriate blog topic.

Stories unfold over a set interval of time. That’s a given. What I want to discuss is how different types of time can be used as story elements to set mood, further plot, and deepen character. [pc: morguefile.com]

Types of Time

There are four types of time that can be used to add atmosphere, set tone, and increase urgency in a story:

• Clock time:  Sets mood and creates suspense.
• Calendar time: Creates a context for events, such as prom, homecoming, and graduation.
• Seasonal time: Creates atmosphere, as well as providing a backdrop and reason for cultural events and…

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Is KDP Select Worth It? (An Example From a Real Person)

Most interesting read. 🙂 Thank you, Blaise.

Blaise Lucey

Amazon’s KDP Select program has kind of been marketed as a Miracle Grow for Books. It seems that, whenever you Google something about KDP Select, you run into another article boasting about authors who got rich and famous from just using KDP Select and barely marketing their book at all.

Like a lot of authors who are having an identity crisis because of the eBook “revolution,” I decided to try the whole self-published route myself. My self-imposed requirements were that I would do minimal marketing, pay nothing to advertise or format it, and publish solely via KDP Select.

The test was this: was KDP Select worth it? Could it actually boost my book, and myself, into super stardom? Was it the future of books?

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Micro-Fiction Mondays: Mr. Teddy Goes Splat

According to Fiction Factor, (http://www.fictionfactor.com/articles/wordcount.html) Micro-Fiction is a very abbreviated story and often difficult to write, and even harder to write well, but the markets for micro fiction are becoming increasingly popular in recent times. Publishers love them, as they take up almost no room and don't cost them their budgets. Pay rates are often …

Stop writing your name in Cursive. You have had Several Warnings.

Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé

Megan Zander at She Knows wrote a post with this headline: Teacher’s aggressive note on 7-year-old’s homework goes viral, and many of the comments are critical of teachers and schools for what the alleged teacher wrote in red ink – the title of this post.

First, I was a public school teacher for thirty years, and I required my students to write their first and last name on every written assignment in addition to the period they were in and the date. When they didn’t write all that information, I wrote in aggressive red ink explaining to them why they lost some points from what the assignment was worth.

How can I justify being so aggressive? Well, I worked with almost 200 students in five or six classes often working 60 to 100 hours a week—25 hours teaching and the rest correcting work and planning lessons (

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