Finding the Right Title
It’s almost a rite of passage to have to change the title of your book when it sells to a publisher, and I fully expected that to happen to me. I figured it would be just one more step in…
Category: The Writing Life
Friday Feast: #TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter, Motivation, Love and Murder, How to (Effectively) Show Support, and Mailman Hero
Here’s one of the best tweets from the #TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter hashtag: “That sounds like so much fun! Wish I could just sit around and write all day.” PSA: Don’t ever insinuate that it’s free time. Please. And thank you. On to…
Training The Un-amusing Muse
“Toz, where the frog are you now?” That’s me foaming at the mouth yesterday morning. But frog—really? My daughter’s been sanitizing my language. Without swearing, I can find Waldo in his red striped hat, no matter how well he hides….
Friday Feast: Authorpreneurship, Self Promotion vs. Spam, and the Dangers of Writing Groups and Buying Too Many Books
Hoo-boy. After sitting alone for hours working on their opuses, writers must then come out of their dark caves and release their work into the wild, strategize about marketing and self promotion, become a brand, read widely to be a…
Talk to Me: Exercises to Liven Up Characters
Character profiles are great for first drafts. I fill out a ton of those for each character. I cast my characters with favorite TV and movie stars. I create playlists for each character. These profiles create character shells, but rarely…
Let Sleeping Masterpieces Lie
Originally written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman was the novel Harper Lee first submitted to her publishers before To Kill a Mockingbird. Assumed to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in late 2014. Figures from online retailer…