The world-changing news came on what could have been a very average day. I'm sitting at my computer, getting ready to leave it for a while and revise the printed pages of my current work-in-progress, when a new message on my screen reads: Dear Elise, we would like to move forward with your delightful story... And I realize that someone is telling me that they want to publish…
Marketing myself as a writer is a lesson I've been gradually learning over the past few moths. Usually I'd grit my teeth about this. Many writers absolutely hate marketing. It feels uncreative, its exhausting, it feels like bragging, etc. But it teaches us how to talk to others about our writing. That's essentially what marketing is--a way to clearly communicate what we're about to the greater world. The time the…
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…