As you read this, I’ll just be settling into my home-for-a-month in Ceret. (Follow me on Instagram for lots of photos.) Because I will be spending several days in transit, I went in search of an older post to set up ahead of time and this one from 2015 seemed especially appropriate. Enjoy! I love […]
I once told a mentor that I’d had an epiphany–to be a writer, you needed to know a lot about the world. And I believe this is true. As writers, we need to understand character in order to create ones that leap off the page. We need to understand nuances of place, so that our […]
Things are hopping around here. I’m preparing for a major life transition—we’re in the midst of planning an addition so that my daughter and her family can move in. Yep, soon I’ll be doing the multi-generational living thing, attempting to keep up a full writing schedule with a six-year-old and a two-year-old running around. But […]
Okay, so there it is–your manuscript. You’ve just gotten it back from your beta readers. Or your editor. Or your agent. Perhaps it is a lovely stack of papers with writing all over the page. Or maybe it is a file on the computer, laden with those little comment boxes. You’ve read over all the […]
Ah, rewriting. So fun! So engaging! So intense! I’m serious, I actually really like it. But it can also be mind-boggling. Where to begin? How to approach it? What to do? One concept that may be useful to you is that of draft passes. I’ve done this myself and recommended it to others, but I’ve […]
One of my dearest friends read last week’s post with the subject line, a love letter about winning, and wrote me that she thought it said whining. To which I responded, what an excellent idea for a newsletter. And so here we go. In the spirit of the Olympics, I am a championship whiner. I can whine about anything, and I […]
Indecision is my downfall. If I know where I’m going next in my writing, it is no problem to sit down to my computer and get words on the page. I can wrack up a good word count in no time. But if I’m not quite sure what to write next, forget about it. My […]
The other night, my husband and I watched an episode of Scorpion, which I’d only see bits and pieces of before and ended up thoroughly enjoying. The show is about a band of misfit computer experts led by Katherine McPhee, who is their interface and explainer of the real world. In this episode, a helicopter […]
I’m all in on the Olympics this month. (Read my blog post from earlier this week about my love of them here.) And no matter what anybody says about brotherhood and world peace and all that jazz, the Olympics are about winning. So, maybe the silver is kinda okay, but the bronze. Bah-boom.* Everybody wants […]
I’ve been working with one of my clients, who shall remain nameless (Hi, Mitch!) to trim down his long middle grade fantasy. Clocking in at over 140,000 words it is, as I said, long. Meanwhile, I recently set out to write a short story. Apparently, I have a hard time writing anything short. The story […]
