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…
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…
Hm. It’s been another 10 days since I’ve updated. Bad me. Let’s see. I’ve been tagged no less than 4 times to do this meme. The following people are to blame for this: AJ Chase, Leigh Royals, Ally Kendall and Jodi Henley. I’m not going to tag anyone else, but I will add my 7…
I’m sure many of you remember the game where you had to fit all the funky shaped little pegs into their appropriately shaped holes before the timer counted down, the board popped up and they all went flying again? Anyway, that’s how I feel lately. I’m holding too many funky shaped pieces and they don’t…
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. In one of the craft books I was reading there was a whole section on the topic. The idea was that sentiment is sincere, honest emotion and sentimentality is a pre-packaged emotional bundle. Clichés become clichés because too many people see the usefulness in the pre-packaged…
I’m working my way through Christopher Vogler‘s The Writer’s Journey this weekend. It’s not a difficult read, there’s just a lot to digest and assimilate. I can already tell that my days of reading strictly for pleasure are over. As Vogler describes the different archetypes and the different phases of the Hero’s Journey, I find…
Reading isn’t quite the same, purely enjoyable experience any more. Heck, even watching movies with DH isn’t. I find I can’t just sit there and passively let the story wash over me. We were watching Akeelah and the Bee when DH turned to me and says, “This is a great study in how to effectively…
I picked up a variety of books at Borders yesterday. They had a small in the writer’s reference section, but I found a couple that were on my list to check out. 20 Master Plots and how to build them by Ronald B. Tobias. I read this one yesterday. “Plot is a process, not an…