writing

Reading Between the Lines

September 30, 2010

Form rejection letters give you very few words to work with, so it’s natural to try to read between the lines and squeeze out a little more meaning; a little more of an explanation. Don’t bother. Really. You’re just putting yourself through unnecessary stress. I don’t mean to be harsh here, but I see a [...]

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Guest Post: “Be Gentle… It’s My First Time” by Philippa Ballantine

September 13, 2010

Be Gentle, It’s My First Time…. What to Expect From Your First Professional Edit by guest blogger Philippa Ballantine You’ve made it! You have your first professional contract under your belt. Full with your success, you are excited about your first professional edit. Well, that was how I felt back in 2004 when I got [...]

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Character Motivation

September 9, 2010

How important is it for a writer to communicate a character’s motivation? Character motivation is critical to writing, but it should not be expressed directly to the reader. It’s the perfect case for the old phrase, “Don’t tell it, show it.” It helps me to think of motivation as an acting word more than a [...]

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SeptOctWriMos: Stretching the Writing Muscles

September 2, 2010

Each November, writers all over the world participate in NaNoWriMo, National Novel-Writing Month. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words on a novel in thirty days. A huge community forms around this shared goal every year, with aspiring authors supporting each other, providing motivation and reference resources and writing tips. But there’s a [...]

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An Interview with the Authoress

August 30, 2010

The mysterious blogger who goes by the name “Authoress” was the first aspiring writer to offer up her work in progress to the infamous Miss Snark for critique. She now runs the successful writing support/critique forum Miss Snark’s First Victim, a blogspace in which aspiring writers can get feedback on their work — both from [...]

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Twitter for Writers

August 26, 2010

Since the realms of journalism and fiction-writing don’t seem to intersect as often as they should, you may have missed an interesting post this week that asks the question Can Twitter Make You a Better Editor? We all know that Twitter is a great social media tool, connecting writers with readers and with the publishing [...]

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Creeps to Watch Out For

August 23, 2010

A manuscript is not a linear creature. We go back and change things. We revise a sentence. A paragraph. A concept. We reorder chapters. New content integrates with old. Ideally, it does this seamlessly. However, a manuscript is also not a body of water. The changes made to the pages don’t ripple naturally through the [...]

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Librarians Love a Challenge

August 19, 2010

We’ve all gotten so accustomed to having the Internet at our fingertips no matter where we are, that it’s easy to forget that there are other resources available to us. One of the benefits of going to the library and looking things up in actual books, is that in the process of doing your research, [...]

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2010 Parsec Finalists

July 29, 2010

The 2010 Parsec Award Finalists have been announced, and I’m quite pleased to see my story “Swimming Lessons” from P.G. Holyfield’s Tales of the Children anthology listed in the Best Speculative Fiction Story (Short Form) category! I’m up against some serious competition. It’s an honor to even be nominated alongside writers like Peter Watts, Mike [...]

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Editing and Short Fiction

July 26, 2010

Should I bother hiring an editor to look over my short fiction, or is it a waste of time? While it’s often dismissed as not being worth the effort, there are a lot of advantages to hiring an editor for short fiction. 1. It’s short! That means it’ll be considerably less expensive than hiring an [...]

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