So far this week, my Debutante Sisters have talked about how the writing journey is solitary, constantly changing, complicated, and a thing to be savored. Now for something completely different. In many ways, the debut author’s journey has much in common with Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The hapless author gets into her craft (in our case, a manuscript rather than a rocket), gets launched on her way,…
… but she’d like to. About a week before my book release, I received an amazing email. A reader who received an ARC through Goodreads went to the trouble of locating my website and emailing me to tell me how much she enjoyed the book. Not just that … she thanked me for writing it. Talk about blown away. It meant the world to me that someone actually took the…
As I mentioned in a comment on Deb Kerry’s fantastic Monday post, I have trouble with endings, written or otherwise. When I come to the end of a novel, or anything else, I have trouble explaining things in simple ways. It’s a lifelong problem, and one I never considered all that much until this topic came around. I’d previously dismissed my trouble with endings as “overattachment” or “trouble tying up…
There’s a famous piece of writerly advice floating around the internet, which says, more or less: “Get your characters up a tree and throw rocks at them.” I can’t remember where it originated, although I think it might have been Stephen King. Wherever it came from, this bit of advice is all well and good for characters in a book, but what about those times when you start to feel…
Today, friends, I have the honor of introducing our VERY LAST DEB LAUNCH. Yes, that’s right: Deb Susan’s engrossing debut, CLAWS OF THE CAT, comes out today, and it is the perfect (or should I say purrrfect) summer read! For a lot of people, summer means travel and vacations, but if you’re me, and you have a four-month-old munchkin demanding your constant attention, exciting vacations aren’t exactly in the cards….
When I signed my contract with Minotaur for the first three books in the Shinobi Mystery series, I accepted that my cover art was out of my control. And I made a decision: Whatever my cover looked like, I would love it. Many authors compare their books to children, and seeing my cover art bore many resemblances to the birth of my son. I didn’t know what my son would…
In his book, Save the Cat!, Author and screenwriter Blake Snyder advised all writers to give every character “a limp and an eyepatch” – an easily identifiable characteristic that sets the character apart from all the others in the scene. I love this advice, and take it to heart – and I use it with dialogue too. When creating characters, I write a journal entry in each character’s voice –…
I love revisions, and couldn’t wait to write about the revision process – how many drafts I write, and how my novels change from start to finish. But when I looked at it seriously, I realized that topic called for a lot of explanation, and Emperor Maximus Angryfish disapproves of lengthy blog posts: Back to the drawing board. I thought I’d write about how I revise – first drafts on…
I’m sensing a pattern at the Ball this week and, as it turns out, I won’t be the one to break it. I, too, obtained my agent without a query – though I have several years (and four trunk manuscripts) worth of queries in my past, so I can speak to the topic from experience. Like Deb Kelly, I found the query an excellent vehicle for distilling my novel’s essence….
I’ve always loved beginnings, and New Year’s Day in particular. New Year’s Day is the stuff of dreams, its potential limited only by imagination. This particular year holds more exciting potential than any other I can remember. It won’t be as emotional as the year I married my husband, or as life-changing as the year I knew I would first hold my son in my arms. But numerically speaking, 2013’s…
