My friends, this is the last day of this exciting promotion and I wanted to be sure you heard the news: Moonlight and Oranges is currently FREE as a Kindle download on Amazon.com and it's moving like hotcakes. I'm pleased to announce that it hit the Top 20 list in the Romance category, and I only anticipate it will keep climbing. Get your Kindle copy today…
Happy New Year! To kick off the birthdays of Time and myself (we're just one day apart), here is a guest post in which I reveal my experience forming a successful critique group. I give instructions on how to replicate this with a small cluster of writing friends. It can be quite tricky, but it's incredibly rewarding! My guest post lives on L.M. Stull's blog. She…
Whether you're writing a novel, novella, or short story, you write in scenes. If you're writing a super short story which often one scene long, this concept still applies. Common scenes: An opening scene, a conclusion scene, a flashback scene, a fight scene, a restitution scene. Scenes compose the building blocks, the steps of the grand staircase that make a story and once you feel comfortable with the basics of grammar…
Imitating excellent art isn't complicated it you know what to look for--and it's not plagiarism if you are using your own unique content. Have you ever ready a brilliant essay or a short story that really packed a punch and wondered how the author had arranged the words in such a pleasing, powerful way? I recently discovered there is a way to learn the structure and model my own…
A synopsis distills the key messages, themes, and direction of a story. Have you ever tried to condense the plot of a novel into one page? How about one or two sentences? It's hard. Really hard. The first time I tried to write a one page synopsis for Moonlight and Oranges, my novel manuscript, I almost went crazy. Cut, revise, rewrite, condense. Delete reference to non-vital scene. Include…
You have reached the level of competency where you need another pair of eyes to look at your writing and honestly tell you what works and what doesn't. You need a critique group. Critique groups for writers are one of the best things you can use to improve your own writing. A good critique group should: 1. Be a safe place for all levels of writers. 2. Give constructive feedback. 3.…
Be impeccable in your word. This is the first of The Four Agreements. In the context of the book's philosphy this is a determined truthfulness and also a dedicated integrity. If you say you will do something, it is tantamount that you do this. Otherwise, your word becomes useless. More on the Four Agreements coming for future posts. For now, it is enough to bring these up and remind myself…
I was entranced by the candid, encouraging and graceful presence of Natalie Goldberg earlier this month. She spoke as the keynote at the Write on the Sound Writers' Conference in Edmonds, WA the first weekend of this month and the theater was packed. Natalie is very famous for her book Writing Down the Bones. She began her talking by jumping right into her process of discovering herself and becoming…
When a hero or heroine sets out on The Quest, are we supposed to like them? I find myself wanting both things at once. I want my protagonist to be likable enough that if she loses her way in a dark forest or breaks her arm from a fall, we experience empathy. I want people to want her to win. In my attempts to make a charismatic…
I've found it hard to get away from the attraction that Greek myths have held for me. Ever since the morning I opened a thin black volume, containing easy-to-read paraphrases of Greek myths, I've been absolutely fascinated with the stories that always played with high stakes--stories that quite often (and usually more often than not) ended with a devastating tragedy. The unfairness of life was captured…