IWSG was created by Ninja Captain Alex J Cavanaugh — because Alex understands we need a safe place to congregate, insecurity is part of our creative nature, and together we’re stronger. On the first Wednesday of each month, you can write on any subject related to your writing journey or adopt the option of answering the month’s question. Either way, you’re in safe territory. …
… another book review by our prestigious reviewer, Marcia Hammerhead. Marcia Hammerhead: if there is anything worse than an author who writes genre trash, it’s a prolific author who writes genre trash. My latest assignment is to interview, once again, prolific author of genre trash, Hank Quense. His newest genre trash is called Moxie’s Problem. According to Quense, it is …
I’m leaving for British Columbia, Canada in a few days and will stay until mid-October when it gets cold. Cluculz Lake is where my husband and I built a log-stick house in 1992. Of course we had help, but we were hands-on. If you’ve read my bio, you’ll know we sold that house and moved to our property across the …
Once you publish a book, a strange thing happens. You suddenly become the CEO of a company. The mission of that company is to market and sell your book. As the CEO, it’s your job to ensure that your company has a marketing plan. A marketing plan consists of defining your customers and the market where your book will compete …
Learning How to Be a Kind Person Takes a Whole Lifetime. This thought – “Learning how to be a kind person takes a whole lifetime” – popped into my head, although I don’t know what triggered the thought. Yet the more I pondered it, the more I wanted to write about it. My first reflection was that my parents taught …
IWSG was created by Ninja Captain Alex J Cavanaugh — because Alex understands we need a safe place to congregate, insecurity is part of our creative nature, and together we’re stronger. On the first Wednesday of each month, you can write on any subject related to your writing journey or adopt the option of answering the month’s question. Either way, you’re in safe territory. …
Let’s assume you are a new (or inexperienced) fiction writer. You probably know that creating a story requires a great deal of work and thinking. You may not know that the work involved is the same whether you are creating a short story, a novel, a play, a script or even a memoir. “How can that be?” you ask. Simply …
Recently an interviewer asked me how I thought the pandemic had changed me. I don’t remember how I answered, although afterwards I thought about this question both as applying to individuals and to writers. As individuals we probably have many different answers, perhaps ranging from becoming more aware of our actions (wearing masks) to what we can do by ourselves …
I’m not answering this month’s question “For how long do you shelve your first draft, before reading it and re-drafting?” because I’m too tired to correlate any sort of thought process onto paper. I hate to blame yet another “issue” on Covid-19, however… (I apologize for rambling.) Have you met anyone that isn’t affected by this pandemic? What a huge …
Once your NaNoWriMo project is completed, it’s time to start thinking about what to do with the manuscript you just finished writing. Of course, the first thing you have to do is revise it (right?). And keep revising it until it’s a polished gem. Once those revisions are completed, it becomes decision time: what happens now? There are several possibilities …
As writers we know that sometimes things in our writing can interrupt the “fictive dream” as John Gardner discusses in his classic book THE ART OF FICTION. For example, this can be an unfamiliar word rather than a familiar one, the deciphering of which pulls readers’ concentration from the story. For me, the most upsetting instances of interrupting the “fictive …
I’ve always wondered what it must be like to have one thousand people show up at your book release. Can you imagine? It would be incredible. But whether there are one thousand, or four hundred, or five, readers are precious. I did a reading many years ago at our local library in Prince George. When it was over, a …