Where Normal Need Not Apply
Ever have one of those days where nothing on your to-do list gets checked off? When life has other plans for you? That happens to me more often than I care to admit. Despite my writing-by-the-seat-of-my-pants method to drafting, I’m a planner in the rest of my life. Or at […]
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In writing, we always want the stakes to increase over the course of a story. The problems get bigger, the risks get bigger, and the reasons the characters need to succeed get bigger. The same concept can apply to real life. When we first start a blog, it doesn’t matter if […]
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My two WordPress workshops are next week, so this is the last time I’ll mention them here on my blog. Try to contain your disappointment. *grin* Today, I’m summarizing the questions and answers from the Facebook chat about WordPress I did last week with Lisa Hall-Wilson. Facebook makes looking through old posts a […]
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All writers, especially those who self-publish, have to decide: Are we writing and publishing just for ourselves? Or are we writing and publishing to get customers (readers)? If we’re doing it for ourselves, things like editing and those nice covers we talked about last time don’t matter. Those who write […]
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I’ve said before that I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. However, I do have several writing goals for this year. Like many writers, my big goal has to do with making progress toward being published, and that means I have to face my fear. For me, that translates into… *dun […]
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New Year’s Day. The time of year when society tells us to make New Year’s Resolutions. We vow to eat better and exercise more. We promise ourselves we’ll carve out more “me-time” for reading or other enjoyable activities. We hope to become better organized or more charitable. Most of those […]
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Back in August, the keyboard I’d used for forever (about ten years) died. I tried using several other keyboards of various ergonomic configurations, but they all made my wrists hurt by the end of the day. After weeks of these inferior (to me) keyboards, my right wrist got so bad […]
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For better or for worse, the National Novel Writing Month (NaNo) of November is over. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve been catching up on sleep. (I lost count of how many nights I stayed up until midnight to get as many words in as possible.) It was […]
Readers often think that fiction writers just make stuff up. And that’s quite true—when it comes to most stories and characters. However, the supporting details of settings, props, jobs, and plot events are another matter. Whatever genre we write, we usually have to do some research in the course of […]
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A couple of months ago, I read a blog post that forever changed how I approached drafting scenes. That probably sounds melodramatic, but it’s true. We’ve often talked about the differences between plotters and pantsers (those who write by the seat of their pants), and how as a die-hard-and-happy-about-it pantser, […]
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