So Tuesday, a real live agent emailed me to ask to look at my full manuscript. Squee! I dropped everything and did a little happy dance and shrieked, and danced a bit more. Wait, let me back up. As most of you know, I made the Semis for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award this year, […]
Raise the Stakes
The difference between a good story and a great one, the difference between a book you work through slowly and one you can’t put down, is largely the stakes. What do I mean by stakes? What your character or characters have on the line. Rather than a routine case, give your detective one that is […]
An Interesting Dilemma
For those of you who haven’t heard as of yet, I am a Semi-Finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. This is awesome(!) but also leads to an interesting dilemma. I’ve made it into the Odyssey Writing Workshop, a pro-level six-week intensive held in a college during the summer. I’ve put down my money to […]
Happy Dance!
I found out Tuesday that I made the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards SemiFinalists! For those that don’t know, that’s top 50 out of 5,000. It’s a miracle, and a dream, and only one cut away from a trip to New York. I’ve said since January that this was going to be the year – and […]
Heads Up: Call for Submissions
University Press of North Georgia is looking for submissions for its upcoming Stonepile Writers’ Anthology. Here’s a copy of the post they put up this morning: Call for Submissions The University Press of North Georgia is now accepting submissions for Volume Two of the Stonepile Writers’ Anthology. The Stonepile Writers is a writing group based […]
Wrestling with the Dragon: Taming Insecurities
Most highly creative people struggle with self-doubt. Am I good enough? Is the work good enough? The difficulty of “breaking in” to most any creative field makes it that much harder. You’re inundated with rejection notes. Passes at auditions. People criticizing you at every turn. But far worse is the Inner Critic – you know […]
A New Take on Pre-Writing
My steampunk class has spent the last month on prewriting, something that in my opinion was worth the price of admission all by itself. In the past, I’ve been a pantser, someone who sits down to write with a little idea and a lot of hope. But, after six revisions on my last book (no […]
Vision, or Saying No To Good Advice
Today I’d like to talk about staying true to yourself, even in the face of good advice. After several years in various writer’s groups I’ve noticed a trend. One, writers are very opinionated about other peoples’ work, and two, there always seems to be at least one person in the group that ends up as […]
Reading Journal
I was talking to one of my writer friends the other day about writing (what else would writer friends talk about?) and heard about a very cool idea. A reading journal. It’s a simple notebook you put next to you when you read and make notes on what works (and what doesn’t) in the books […]
Woot! Next Round of ABNA
In an exciting turn of events, Alex has made the Quarter Finalists cut for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. Only 250 folks make it out of 10,000 – top 2.5%, baby. In a crazy twist of fate I was chosen and one of the ladies in my writer’s group was not. Since she made the […]
