Where Normal Need Not Apply
After I agreed to do a guest post for my friend Melinda Collins, she suggested I write something about worldbuilding. Despite being a paranormal author who continually invents worlds slightly different from our own, I haven’t written many posts about that topic yet, so I sat down to brainstorm ideas. […]
In my last post, we talked about voice and how we tend to write the same types of characters, premises, and themes over and over. That’s not a bad thing. Those stories resonate with us as writers. Similarly, there are stories we would never write. Stories might be so against our internal grain […]
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I’ve been having a great conversation with Serena Yung in the comments of one of my posts about voice from a few weeks ago, so voice has been on my mind again this week. When I found a fantastic article by author Julie Leto about voice and how it relates to our writing, […]
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Our brand is the impression others have of us. So we all have a brand, whether we know it or not. Hopefully, we’re building a brand that reflects who we really are, in a way that shows us at our best (however we each define “best”). Once we have a […]
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In my last post about Google search terms, I mentioned that we sometimes have lots of content around a search’s keywords and yet have never answered the question directly. In that case, Google just gave us an idea for a blog post. *smile* One search term that led people to my blog this […]
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That’s right. I’m asking you to expose your biggest weakness. *locks the door so no one can escape* *evil grin* We all have weaknesses. I’m one of the biggest perfectionists around, but that doesn’t prevent me from having oodles of imperfections. It’s only by knowing where we need more work […]
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I’m excited to share today’s guest post by editor A. Victoria Mixon with everyone. Her new book The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual recently came out and is a great addition to our writing craft library. In fact, her blog tour posts have been excerpts from this […]
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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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My to-be-read pile is scary. Seriously scary. Like I-might-need-to-check-into-a-program-soon scary. In the past year, I’ve accumulated over 100 print books. And just since Christmas, when I received my Kindle, I’ve downloaded about 20…er, maybe 30…hmm, possibly more…Kindle books. Honestly, most of those books I got for free, either from giveaways […]
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Earlier this week, Julie Musil had a great post about how to create story endings that resonate. I almost wrote an epic comment to her post, but decided to save my wordiness for here. And I get to use one of my vacation pictures—Disney’s California Adventure theme park, get it? […]
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