We’re often told as writers that we should try to maximize the drama, conflict and tension in our stories. Put our characters through hell, make them suffer. Stories may not pull the reader along unless bad things happen to the … Continue reading
A while ago—I’m ashamed to admit how long—someone told me I needed to consider getting my daily word count up. I was in a strange phase of my project, where I was trying to boost word count but also editing … Continue reading
Nathan Bransford had a post today on dealing with rejection. And, with impeccable timing, I received a rejection today. So here’s how I deal with it: I allow myself to grieve. For between 1 hour and 1 day. But it’s … Continue reading
If you do your writing on a Mac, and haven’t already heard of Scrivener, you may want to check it out. I’d been doing my writing on MS Word, with index cards in Mindola SuperNotecard, and logs and research in … Continue reading
Some nice advice from Steven Galloway in this Globe & Mail article: Steven Galloway has achieved remarkable success by ignoring a piece of advice frequently offered to young writers: Write what you know. “I believe that to be the biggest … Continue reading
I’m not in promotion mode at the moment, but I thought the advice in this post by J.A. Konrath (from link by Bella Stander) very wise. My favourite quote: …let the public always see you as successful.
My new critique group had questions on getting the postage right on a SASE included in a query to an agent in the U.S. We seem to be mostly Canadians so the question was: how to calculate the postage correctly … Continue reading
I just completed one of the most valuable editing exercises ever (courtesy of Donald Maass’ workshop at SiWC). I printed out the book. I shuffled all the pages. I made sure no page remained in sequential order. I edited each … Continue reading