Over a thousand writers stared at their phones yesterday, willing them to ring. Only around 150 of them received the call they were waiting for. Yesterday the Romance Writers of America (RWA) announced the Golden Heart and RITA finalists. One of the largest writing organizations in the world released the names […]
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Update: Sorry, this pitch session is now closed. I might do another one at some point, so stay tuned. Thanks for your interest! The Pitch Your Shorts pitch session is officially open! Please read the whole post for all the details. We’ll have at least six (6!) editors from Entangled Publishing […]
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My regular readers know I typically write novel-length stories. However, during one crazy four-day stretch, I wrote a long-ish short story/short-ish novella (novelette?). For those of you following along at home, I’m referring to my story inspired by spam. I’ve blogged before about how the experience was a great way […]
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Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S. The day we eat too much food, roll our eyes at the antics of our extended family, and think about all the things we’re grateful for. Or in my case, wait for the tryptophan to kick in from the turkey so I can catch […]
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The end of this week marks the unofficial beginning to the holiday shopping season in the United States. Thursday is our Thanksgiving holiday, and the day after is known as Black Friday, the day retailers finally sell enough to put their accounting books “in the black” for the year. I’m […]
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Believe it or not, I sometimes actually follow my own advice. *smile* Recently, I helped score a few contest entries, just like I recommend in my post about why all writers should volunteer to judge contests. One of the entries was—I’m afraid there’s no nice way to say this—dreadful. The […]
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Some people post their work online all the time. Photographers have Shutterstock. Artists have deviantART. Non-fiction authors often base their books on their blog posts. What about fiction authors? That’s a little trickier. We’re not talking about flash fiction, blog hop entries, and the like here. If we limit the […]
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Many articles have been written about traditional vs. self publishing (this blog is no exception, as my articles here and here prove), and agent Rachelle Gardner’s recent post added an intriguing twist to the conversation. She asked her readers who are sticking with traditional publishing to explain their reasons why. […]
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Over the past six months, I’ve received feedback on my work from many sources—contest judges to beta readers. A lot of them told me things I didn’t want to hear. It would have been very easy to get defensive and react along the lines of: Didn’t they read it? It’s […]
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Opinionated statement alert: Every writer should volunteer to judge a writing contest. And not simply for altruistic reasons. No, we should do it because we can learn from reading others’ work, as it’s much easier to see mistakes in prose other than our own. My friend Anassa Rhenisch had […]
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