Earlier this week I was able to guest post about outlining a novel on Sophie Li’s blog Sophie’s Corner. I present three different novel outlining strategies you can follow when working on a project like the upcoming 2019 National Novel Writing Month. Head on over to Sophie’s Corner here to read the entire post.
If writing were easy, everyone would be doing it. While there are grammar and spelling rules to follow, most of the time writing is about blazing your own trail. This is hard to do, though, for those like me who feel the need for structure in their projects and writing schedules. Wouldn’t it be great […]
I think New Year’s resolutions are neat in theory. Lose weight. Be more social. Read x amount of books. But they’re just so hard to keep! For example, I wrote in 2017 that I had three main writing goals: publish my novel, write and publish an original short story, and blog every week. I only […]
All Things Together is finished. Repeat: my novel is finished. This is a big deal! There should be rejoicing in the streets, a cake ordered, a ball scheduled. What started out as a high school project in 2010 is now complete, being formatted for MOBI and EPUB, and awaiting a cover reveal (follow me on Twitter […]
“Kill your darlings.” I hate that term. It was first introduced to me by my friend Gina Rosati (you should check out her book, Auracle, here—you’ll love it!) during a meet the writers session at our local library. Widely attributed to William Faulkner, but first known to be said by Arthur Quiller-Couch, the saying basically […]
…. …. …. Writers block sucks. I’d liken it to that feeling you get when your crush is heading your way and you want to talk to them, but. Just. Can’t. Even if they smile and wave and would likely hang out for a while. The blank screen, the empty piece of paper—they’re just waiting […]
I was recently thinking about the brainstorming process and what comes after. There are two schools of thought for drafting your story once you come up with an idea: You can either plot out everything in an elaborate outline or you can go by the seat of your pants and just make it up as […]
The first month of 2017 absolutely flew by. I feel like I was just getting started on my writing goals yesterday, but here we are on the 31st and halfway through what I consider to be the worst two-month stretch of the year: January and February. It’s too dark and too cold! But I digress. […]
As I sit here writing this, DJ Tone Terra is mixing live over the radio. It’s a funny thing, being a DJ—there’s a lot more skill involved than just fading songs in and out on the turntables. There are BPMs to match, keys to consider, listener requests to work in. I’ve played around on Virtual […]
Do you ever get a great idea and then it just kind of…fizzles out? I do. All the time. I had one in mind earlier this week that I started, wrote about 400 words, and then decided it wouldn’t work. So I set it aside. I have a Word document with dozens of story ideas—working […]