Author of Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success This week, I’m privileged to have K.M. Weiland back to talk about outlining. Katie is the author of two novels and one book on writing, as well as the blogger behind the award-winning writing site, Wordplay, and the multi-author blog, …
Victoria Mixon’s The Art & Craft of Fiction: a Practitioner’s Manual 2010, La Favorita Press The Review One of the frustrations when buying instructional books is determining if a book is written for someone of a similar skill level as yourself. In a break between writing, I spent five years …
Oops, I Misspelled Again After posting A Good Day for Driving, a friend pointed out some spelling errors. This is to be expected: I live in the soil underneath the basement of bad spellers and survive only because of inline spell-checking. I’m so accustomed to having my spelling checked on …
Showing Up Late to the Party Before you continue on with this entry, read Victoria Strauss’s brilliant post on why the current publishing ecosystem is dangerous for authors. The most important comments I was planning on making on ebooks are made better there. Alas, I Tweeted that and really should …
I’ve reached a point in writing The Forty-seven Words of the Broken Girl where I need to analyze the structure to go forward. Structure and plot are related but not identical: structure, in my usage, encompasses plot and all the thematic threads that run through the story that aren’t necessarily …
I recently got a new laptop. A new laptop I super like. However, as the computer I’ve been using for the last five years has a different CPU, a lot of my old software doesn’t run on it. Unexpectedly, this is a huge win, since it keeps my laptop focused …
Once I wrote the final sentence of my first draft (“No rules, Miss Relinkerys.” for those who who can’t help but peek at the end), I spent two weeks going through my print-out with a red pen and a highlighter. The pen was for small corrections or huge ones (e.g., rewrite this section; tighten argument), while the highlighter was used to either highlight entire sentences that needed work or to point out repeated words. The page of champions: 32 instances of “God.” I have no idea how to fix that—in Jinxx’s world nobody would think of using a pronoun for God and that particular page involves thinking about God an inordinate amount. A solution will come.