All posts by Sue Duff

I am a writer who pays the bills as a speech-language pathologist in an inner city school district in Colorado. I have a grown son and an octogenarian miniature dachshund who is perfectly happy to sleep at my feet until she wakes up and realizes she's being ignored or can't remember where her food dish resides.

A Cook’s Guide to Writing – If It’s Bland, Season It


notebook and pencil for recipes and spices in spoons on wooden tNot everything that boils in my pot is to my liking. If it lacks taste or aroma, I add some spice. I’ll grab the tried and true salt and pepper but too often that isn’t interesting enough and I begin to experiment with seasonings that the recipe might not have called for. Add some cumin for its rich nutty and smoky flavor, or splash some Tabasco in it to give it some real kick.

If your protagonist is too perfect, the ladies won’t feel nurturing and sympathetic toward them. If your characters are common and stereotypical, give them a trait or taboo that makes us sit up and take notice. If your setting lacks imagination find a new location or bring it to life with all five senses. Nothing draws a reader into an imaginary environment like smells, textures and tastes. Find exotic seasonings and don’t be afraid to use them. “Cold” might be exactly what the recipe calls for but “frigid” or “Arctic” might make us shudder on a sweltering day and crave mom’s iced tea

. Keep us riveted to our couch with well-paced plot. That way we won’t take a break to make some tea until the end of the chapter, better yet, the end of the book.

A Cook’s Guide to Writing – Grandma’s Recipes


Vegetables and Spices on a Wooden Background and Paper for NotesUse the freshest of ingredients. It’s how our ancestor’s cooked long before perusing the small print of ingredients became the norm and not cooking healthy became punishable by premature death due to cholesterol-laden veins and obesity.

When you have something to write about, write. Don’t process, edit or over-think what is pouring out your fingers and onto the page or screen until your first draft has a last page with a final period. Use everything at your fingertips and don’t stop to read the ingredients. Keep it rich and fresh

. The healthy will come later, when you put on your farmer hat and return to the soil, pluck the weeds and the puny sprigs to cultivate the healthier plants. Then, and only then you will cook up something tasty and everyone will know you created it from scratch.

A Cook’s Guide to Writing – Don’t Start with the Gadgets


Cooking concept. Basic baking ingredients and kitchen tools closJust to clarify, I have nothing against technology – in fact I embrace technology with every fiber of my being. I don’t want to live, or cook, without it. My meals might taste as good, but heck, it’s not as much fun when you don’t use a garlic press. I squeeze with all my might and the pungent aroma assaults me a fraction of a second before pure garlic oozes out of the pin-tipped holes. I love that the stubborn skin is left inside the press and I was spared the job of peeling the electrostatic paper-thin layers off myself.

But let’s get real. Technology isn’t always the best place to start. I first learned to cook by chopping small cloves of garlic with a knife before discovering that it was easier to smash the thing with the flat edge of it. If I had used the garlic press from the beginning, I wouldn’t have learned to appreciate the clove’s swirls of lime and pearl-white inner layers and how perfectly smooth, yet sticky, the clove felt between my fingers.

Sitting down in front of a computer won’t put words on the screen any more than staring at a food processor will get you the best homemade salsa in the world. A freshly sharpened pencil with a virgin eraser or sparkly pen wrestled from an impenetrable cellophane package won’t do the trick either.

We need to live before we can write about it. The good news is, if you breathe air and have a few working brain cells, you’re qualified. It helps if you have language and a means to translate it into words

. Write what you hate, suffer, love passionately, like lots – in other words, feel, think or wonder about. It just might be better than therapy. Nothing’s more satisfying than sobbing, laughing hysterically or nibbling a hole the size of Texas into your lip over a keyboard. Well, other than clutching a first draft in your hand or serving the perfect, glistening brown turkey on Thanksgiving Day.

The afternoon book hour


Magic BookBooks taught me that anything was possible. I have my mother to thank. She drove us to the library every couple of weeks to check out our allotment of books and each afternoon we were sent to our bedrooms to read

. In hindsight, our reading time allowed her the calm and quiet house required to feed her passion. I remember novels stacked on her bedside table, a different one migrating to the top of the pile every few days. As a five year old I couldn’t imagine reading such thick books with hundreds of pages. Where were the pictures? It took the passage of time to appreciate the extraordinary power that books held between their covers. Characters that popped out of a page and into the imagination, worlds near, far and beyond the stars. I miss those quiet, carefree midday hours propped up on my bed with the tick-tock of our old grandfather clock down the hall and the smell of the fresh ink stamp in my book from the public library.

In a better world …


Best Internet Concept of global business from concepts seriesI have decided that no level of technology knowledge prepares you for all things technology. It’s as diverse as sand pebbles on a beach and just as irritating to wade through when progress, or in this case a wave, slams you with the latest version. I laid claim to my domain name a couple years ago and put off developing my website for the same reasons everyone else does. Money and time, both of which went to my love of writing while avoiding the unknown

. Oh, I had friends fling words around like “easy, simple, no time at all.” They gave me credit for knowing how to connect computer parts, work a mouse wheel like a pro and even compose email. I’m the “go-to” tech support for my father, for heaven’s sake!

Chuck it out the window. I’m ready to turn in my unpaid tech union card. Throwing together a website took days, countless tech support calls/emails and my first born. But it now exists right out there for the world to hover. I promise to share insight, wisdom beyond my years and my latest musings worth posting. I better. It took most of my vacation.