I've been thinking a lot about the novel I'm writing lately. Thinking, not writing, because with the demands of the Emma Jean book release and attendant promotion, there's not been a lot of time to write. I knew this going in and decided to give myself a free pass on working on the novel this […]
I mentioned process writing recently in another post but I want to look at it more in depth today. Why? I'll tell you why. Because I've realized that nearly all of my product writing has its origins in process writing. As in, blog posts, articles, and notes for scenes flowing from my pen. As in, […]
When I was invited to speak to the Living Writer's Collective in Tennessee a couple of weeks ago, my topic was the Fear of Writing. The subject was enthusiastically received, with several writers sheepishly admitting to me that they suffered from it (and Lord knows I've dealt with it off and on throughout my career), […]
I'm participating in Nanowrimo this year. Sort of. I doing it, but not really doing it. The Nanowrimo rules state you can do as much prep work as possible up to November 1st, but you can't actually start writing until the first day of the month. And I'd already written about 60 pages of my […]
I'm a huge fan of free writing ( writing to prompts, when you set a timer and write, not stare off into space, not think deep thoughts, write, just letting your hand move across the page), and I recommend it as a practice all the time. I even have a page on my blog devoted […]
Priming the pump–an old cliche, right? Yet sometimes cliches have things to teach us. I've been thinking about priming the writing pump lately because I've had a successful experience of it. My idea of priming the pump is doing a bit of pre-work to get a flow going. But I decided to look up the […]
It's the state we all desire—that white-hot obsessiveness when we're madly throwing words on the page, totally at one with the moment, completely absorbed in our creativity. But sometimes it is not so easy to get to this state. Is it even possible to access on a regular basis? My answer is yes—but you may […]
During one of the free sessions I did last month, I talked with a writer about foreshadowing and how sometimes getting it in is really clunky. Like, you might as well scream it from the rooftops, "I'm foreshadowing something important here," clunky. And since I went right from that session to working on a chapter […]
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 […]
I've been hiding from the world because of my new hair color cleaning my office and going through old files and I found a sheaf of notes from a long-ago writing class that I took. (It was in 1991, to be exact, because I dated it.) What happened was that my writing group at […]
