This one, again, is thanks to @__Deb, who gave me my blog topics for the month of May. That girl’s just chock full of good ideas. (All wrapped up in hand-knitted sweaters.) I know you hear a lot of advice about making your protagonist heroic. Internally-conflicted. Easy for the reader… Read more“8 Ways NOT to Describe Your Main Character”
Author: Victoria
Writing & not writing what you know
A very well-read friend of mine, who is not a writer, keeps giving me the sage advice of write what I know. I’ve tried that. I don’t like it. I much prefer to let my somewhat askew of center brain go to places of imagination which I have never experienced… Read more“Writing & not writing what you know”
Free drawing for my book: The Art & Craft of Fiction
Hey, everyone, K.M. Wieland has a free ebook drawing going on right now at her blog for a copy of The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual. You can look inside! That’s it at the top right of my page. I know. I ought to be the one… Read more“Free drawing for my book: <em>The Art & Craft of Fiction</em>”
#editingchat 4/28/11
Once again, my sterling memory rewards me. That and the big ole note I wrote to myself last week. It’s #editingchat day again, people, today at noon Pacific Standard Time. (That’s 1:00 pm MST. 2:00 pm CST. 3:00 PM EST. And I believe 8:00 pm GST for those of you… Read more“#editingchat 4/28/11”
Critiquing & being critiqued
I struggle with critiquers having a mind set of ‘just the facts’ style of writing, paring the story down to the bare bones, but maybe that’s not the writer’s ‘true style’ and the critters can’t see that, so even when the mss. is whittled down to its essence, there still… Read more“Critiquing & being critiqued”
We can’t leave fiction alone—Talking Revision
Last week, Roz Morris and I had the third of our four scheduled weekly editorial chats: Talking Prose. The week before we were Talking Character. And the first week we were Talking Plot. We’re running these chats here once a week throughout the month of April. We were deep and… Read more“<em>We can’t leave fiction alone</em>—Talking Revision”
The 3 Basic Aspects of Showing-Not-Telling
Hey, folks. It’s going to be a light-weight post this week, for two very good reasons: Last week’s post ate my brain. But at least now it’s written, so the next time someone asks me, “What’s really going on with publishing these days?” I can just give them a Mona… Read more“The 3 Basic Aspects of Showing-Not-Telling”
#editingchat 4/21/11
I remembered! May the heavens open and the angels sing. I remembered to tell you guys we’re holding #editingchat! Today at noon Pacific Standard Time on Twitter. You can go to that link and follow the conversation even if you don’t have a Twitter account (although you need to be… Read more“#editingchat 4/21/11”
We can’t leave fiction alone—Talking Prose
Last week, Roz Morris and I had the second of our four scheduled weekly editorial chats: Talking Character. The week before that we were Talking Plot. We’re running these chats here once a week throughout the month of April. We had great fun and talked about the very essence of… Read more“<em>We can’t leave fiction alone</em>—Talking Prose”
Bringing quality literature to the masses
The quality debate is of course the biggie. If the legacy publishers are already dumbing down expectations, and new writers are self-publishing too soon with inferior quality products, what chance of quality works being found? Or maybe, just maybe, I need to rethink what “quality” writing is. Is “quality” writing… Read more“Bringing quality literature to the masses”