Gambling was a part of life in the Regency Era. Card games abounded: faro, whist, hazard. Fortunes were won and lost on a nightly basis in the clubs, gaming hells, and card rooms of London. But I don’t want to talk about those kinds of stakes today. Moving forward again in Writing the Breakout Novel…
I’m sure everyone is going to be sick of the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass by the time I’m done, but I’m finding it useful to think about these topics from outside the point of view of thinking only about my characters and I hope it provides someone else some insight along…
Tomorrow’s the big day. DD’s first day of middle school and DS’s first day as a BMOC — yah, he’s a fifth grader. Today’s kinda crazy rushing around trying to get everything finished and together for tomorrow. I really didn’t like the alarm going off at 6am in preparation for this momentous occasion. We’re also…
It’s time to talk and think about conflict again. I just noticed the last time I touched on this topic was March. I should have paid more attention to it then and maybe I wouldn’t be such a tight corner now. The craft books keep hammering on how you need to have conflict to make…
Ok, so I had this great aha! moment and now trying to work with it, I keep running into a brick wall. I spent a good chunk of time today taking the writing exercises at end of Chapter Five on Conflict in Leigh Michael’s book On Writing Romance. I got a bit closer to figuring…
I mentioned in a comment of my previous post on trying to figure out how to structure a new romance story that I’d just purchased two craft books and experienced one of those Aha! moments while reading the first one: On Writing Romance: How to Craft a Novel That Sells by Leigh Michaels. I shall…
So, I began this writer’s journey in earnest a little over seven months ago. I’m not counting any previous false starts (they never lasted long before) or tangential experiences (we’re talking stringing sentences together, but more interactive and emergent stuff or related non-fiction). What I mean is a serious focus on craft and honest attempts…
I’m stuffing the rewrite of Revealed back into a “drawer” again. I want to wait until a couple people have read it and commented more thoroughly on it before tearing it apart again and just sitting here second-guessing myself. I still don’t have a lot of ideas on how I’m going to fix the hero’s…
I find myself rather annoyed with Hugh Daniel Leighton, Viscount Barrington. Last fall, he whispered sweet seductions in my ear like the practiced rake he was, urging me to tell his story. So I abandoned the ms where he’d been a secondary character and found him a nice girl with a few quirks of her…
I finally made some forward progress on the Food Critic and the Chef story last night. As you an see, I don’t have a working title for it yet. Nothing has jumped out and grabbed me. I’m probably going to completely overhaul what I have written so far. I keep reading and learning new and…