Emotional Structure

Teaching Moments

This week for our How I Write series, my accountability group was asked about teaching moments: “What have you recently learned from a REAL LIFE event/happening that you can apply to your writing/writing career?” Have you ever felt like the universe is trying to tell you something? It’s been shouting at me lately. When the…

So… You Wanna Be A Writer?

This week’s topic for my accountability group in our How I Write Series is “What do you wish you had known before you had even started to write? What would you have told your past self? Would you have discouraged yourself or encouraged? Would you have gone a different route?” So… this post isn’t so…

Plotting via Spreadsheets – Don’t Be Trapped in the Box

Last week, we talked about How We’d Spend A Day With One of Our Characters, but this week’s entry in our How I Write series, takes a closer look at our planning process. So, since we’re all writers, we’re focusing on plotting, which inevitably leads to the question: Plotter vs Pantser or some weird mix?…

Building Character

This week my accountability group is blogging about how we flesh out/develop a fiction character for our stories. Last week’s post on our bookshelves and influential authors is also part of our How I Write series. In order to answer the question about HOW, I think I need to share what character depth & complexity…

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Structure

Just like we need a bit of structure in our lives in order to thrive and stretch our selves to reach our goals, our writing needs a bit of structure to it. This helps keep the story coherent and cohesive and helps it resonate with the reader. I’m sure there are experimental constructions out there…

Work In Progress!

My WIP saw actual progress over the last two days. It’s Spring Break here for the kids and they were already crying they were bored by lunchtime yesterday. Today, I further taxed their powers of self-entertainment by taking them with me to get the tires on the van looked at. The guy told me, “I…

Ker-Snap!

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…

Cheese with my whine?

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…

The Plot Thickens…?

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…

11757

No, not an obscure reference to Lindenhurst, NY‘s zipcode. Nor is it one to The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco in Project Gutenberg or even the model number of George Foreman’s Chrome Baby Grill on Amazon.co.uk. 11,757 is my total word count on the novel I’m working on for NaNoWriMo. That’s right — 88…