Your Novel’s Welcome Mat: Intriguing Titles

Welcome Mat: Your Novel’s Title
When you are brainstorming titles, think of it as a welcome mat. A title’s job is to bring readers into your novel, story, or picture book. This is why the title is often changed by

Idaho Writers

Reports from Idaho: Novel Revision Retreat
Several participants from the Idaho Novel Revision Retreat have blogged about the weekend. And here are pictures of some of the great writers who were there.

Arkansas Literary Festival Report

The Arkansas Literary Festival took place last weekend and was great fun.
Literacy on the Lawn, Arkansas Governor’s Mansion
The festival began for me with the arrival of my friend, Dori Butler, who was staying at my house. She was supposed to arrive early on Thursday, so we could visit, but the flights were delayed and she [...]

Evaluate Career, Market: Result is a New Book

Career Evaluations and Study of the Market
I rarely post personal things, but good news is made to be shared. This story begins a couple years ago when I was looking at what I was writing and realized I’d like to also write something about nature. I started looking for picture book ideas on nature and [...]

Shrunken Manuscript Reveals Novel’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Shrunken Manuscript Technique Helps Visualize Problems
Following my directions for shrinking, marking and evaluating a novel, here are some recent examples:

Digital Versions of The Wayfinder

My novel, The Wayfinder, is now available in two different digital versions. You can still find used copies of the book on Amazon, Abebooks and other online stores. In addition, you can download the novel from Amazon’s Kindle store and from Mobipocket’s Ebook store.
Amazon’s version requires the Kindle, Amazon’s exclusive ebook reader. Mobipocket can [...]

Ebooks

Are Ebooks finally ready for Prime Time?
I hated it when, about ten years ago, my local library went to the online digital version of the reference book, Books in Print. I tried to look up something about quilts. There were about 5-600 entries beginning with Quilt in the title, and in the paper version, I’d [...]

El Dorado School Visit

School Visit Focuses on State Projects

Character and Plot

I’ve been working on my plot this week – which means I’ve been working on character.
I’ve been struck again by how interwoven these two are. We artificially separate them out to talk about them, but in practice, you can’t work on plot without considering character.

Conflict. For example, when I tried to decide on what conflict [...]

First page

First Page: So much from so few words
At the AR-SCBWI fall retreat this weekend, Alexandra Penfold, Associate Editor of S&S took us through a discussion of first pages of our novel mss. She commented on the pages, then opened the discussion for other comments or questions. Here are some observations on the discussions (Note: these [...]