Where Normal Need Not Apply
Writers are often a neurotic, self-doubting lot, so many of us long for validation. However, any validation is only temporary, and the best we can do is try to develop a healthy relationship with those desires.
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I’ve said before that line editing is the hardest type of editing to nail down. We can say that line editing is about how we write scenes and paragraphs, but what does that mean? What does line editing encompass?
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Science can be influenced by societal assumptions, so we certainly can’t keep “social ideas” out of our fiction. Our preferences, biases, beliefs, assumptions, etc. affect everything—whether we recognize them or not.
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This time of year is ripe for wrap-ups of what we accomplished over the previous year. However, it’s easy to reach the end of 2017 and feel like a failure for not accomplishing enough or not reaching a certain goal or milestone.
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It’s hard to get our opening pages just right because we have to grab readers’ attention, introduce our characters and the story world, hint at a problem, etc. With everything we want to get across to the reader, we might dump too much information. How can we avoid info dumping or confusing readers at the beginning of our story?
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Clichés, tropes, and stereotypes all seem like signs of lazy writing. And they are—or at least, they can be. But it can be impossible to avoid all instances of stereotypical elements. So what should we do instead?
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In the writing and self-publishing world, writers encounter a lot of services that cost money. Some of them are solid resources that are worth it if they work for our processes. Others…? Not so much. That’s why it’s always nice to discover free resources or discounted services.
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One of the many reasons we need feedback is to help us fill in the blanks for things we can’t see or for understanding how others might interpret our words. But what happens when readers see our words and understand our intention, but they don’t believe what we’re telling them?
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Yesterday marked the release of my fifth book, Stone-Cold Heart. Even though I didn’t do anything special, that was a mistake. We should take the time to celebrate our victories, no matter what they are or where we find them.
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Due to my health issues over the past 14 months, I’ve missed a lot of self-imposed deadlines, and it’d be easy to get frustrated. But it’s important to remember that slow progress is not a failure. Slow progress is still better than nothing.
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