Category: Blog Posts

I know. I’ve written about time before. I probably will write about it again. It’s that important. Writing takes time – between day-job and daily commute, between cooking/eating/showering/sleeping, between family and friends and home maintenance, there’s blogging, reviewing, researching, brainstorming, writing and editing and rewriting. That was the point of my previous post. This time,…

Every writer knows this drill. You put words to paper (or screen), read them over and think, “Hey, that’s not half bad. In fact, I am a genius.” Okay, maybe not those exact words. I started my first novel with no clear idea of where I wanted it to go. By the time I took…

How often have you come back from a week vacation and felt as though you needed a few days off to recuperate before heading back to work? That’s where I am right now. But it’s all good. I got to spend time with family exploring new territory in an island nation I’d never visited (Bermuda)….

Recently, I finished a speculative fiction short I’ve shown to no one yet (except hubby). I haven’t even looked at it myself in almost two weeks. I wrote, finished and set it aside. On purpose. I’d heard of this tactic before, but never tried it. Then several short stories were rejected months after I’d submitted…

Earlier this year I signed up for fiction classes at my local writer’s center (The Muse Center – the-muse.org). Two were one-time workshops: one to focus on finding and querying an agent, and one to discuss the importance of the first 1000 words in a manuscript. Both were excellent, and gave me a lot to…

For some reason, lately my head is full of ideas for stories. No, seriously. It’s always been full of ideas for a single story, one that had many parts and threads. Now, the ideas are independent of that tale, branching out into a number of different directions and genres. Two new novels are simmering amongst…

Wow … I just realized it’s been a whole month since I posted – Sorry y’all! It’s been a crazy few weeks and the time just got away from me. (Read “Finding Time to Write,” also posted today.) Truth is, in the last month, I finished a tiny revision on my novel and sent it…

If you aspire to write, you know the dream—quit the day job, write full time, make bucketloads of money doing it. Yeah. I’m familiar with that one, too. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way, at least not for most of us. Even published writers have said to break-out sessions at conferences, “Don’t quit your day…

I’ve heard it stated over and over at conferences, in blog posts and articles, and from my editor, Paula. Good writing isn’t about a character, or group of characters. It isn’t even about those characters doing things. It’s about those characters being prevented from achieving a goal. The whole point of a good story is…

That first summer I worked with Paula on editing my manuscript, I read more than I wrote. Some of the books I read were helpful, and still sit on my shelf for future reference or inspiration. But the three that really stood out for me were Larry Brooks’ Story Physics and Story Engineering, and Christopher…