A Post Wherein I Explore Two Approachs to Writing and Confess I Don't Know Which is Best. Let's begin with balance. It has been a bit of a massive buzz word the past few years, with experts telling us we need it in our lives and offering advice on how to achieve it. Seems it's […]
Voice. We all want it. We worry about whether we have it or not. We're pretty sure we need it in order to get published, yet we might not even know exactly what it is. And it's almost for certain that we don't know how to get it. So what is voice? It is your […]
So, I'm looking for an agent. I have an offer to publish my book and in the old days this would be a slam dunk. I remember sitting in sessions at writing conferences hearing stories of people who got a contract with a publisher and were told it was a sure-fire way to get an […]
The press that will print my book. Kidding. On Monday, I told you that a small publishing house has agreed to publish my novel. Today, I'm going to tell the story of how it came about. (It feels a little weird to be writing so much about it, seeing as how all I know so […]
As most of you know, I've written several novels and have been obsessively heavily marketing the most recent one, Emma Jean's Bad Behavior. Over and over again, I get the same response from agents: We love it. But… But Emma Jean is too brash. But Emma Jean is unlikeable (because she does what she wants […]
Here's something I forget: We write to figure things out. We write to discover what we know. We write to uncover what we don't know. And yet. We sit down to the page and think we have to be experts. We sit down to write and think it has to come out perfect. We sit […]
Okay, in the last post in this series, I said it was the final article. The end, finito, donezo. Ha! Because the other day, while working on setting in my own novel, the thought occurred: I left setting out of my series on prepping for the novel. Duh. This from a woman who wrote her […]
Your novel is on one of these shelves! First off, I know, I know. I like me some convoluted headlines, don't I? You'd think a writer would be good at firing off snappy subject lines, but alas, such is not the case with this writer. I think it's the novelist in me who loves […]
I've been obsessed playing with Pinterest the last couple of days. I love this new site where you can create online picture boards, tagging photos from across the web. Not that this should be a surprise–you're on the blog of a woman who offers a free Ebook on creating Vision Boards, after all. But what […]
I know. It's very shocking. When I suggest to clients and students that they may want to try writing by hand, there is sometimes outright rebellion. To most writers these days, writing means writing at the computer, whether that computer is a desk version or a laptop (my own preferred option). Okay. I hear you. […]
