A fellow writer recently posed this question to me: Is my mss ready to submit? THE AGONY OF DECIDING The short answer is, you don't know. You can only send it out and see what response you get. That's agony. You want to be accepted and published, but no one can guarantee that. The simple fact is ...
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8 Most Popular Writing Books with Our Readers
From time to time, we recommend writing books, and we find that some are popular with our readers. Following are the most popular how-to-write books purchased by our readers in the last six months on Amazon, the first half of 2015*. Action! Writing Better Action with Cinematic Techniques Certainly one of my favorite new writing books is ...
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What’s in Your Writer’s Bag of Tricks? Putting the Writing Process in Context
I'm in the middle of a big revision of the first book of a sff trilogy and I thought I knew what to do. I've written several novels now and when I get to this stage, there's one big problem. I am sick of reading the thing. How many times do you read a novel before ...
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4 Revision Goals: Conflict, Emotion, Surprise, Enrich
For the next month, my writing goals for my work-in-progress novel trilogy are clear: conflict, emotion, surprise, enrich. The trilogy is tentatively called, The Blue Planets, and is an early-teen or YA science fiction. Book 1, The Blue Marble, has a complete draft; for Books 2 and 3, I have complete outlines. I'm happy with all ...
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Beta Readers: Facts, Grammar, Plot, Character and More
Thanks to the computer industry, we no longer have first readers, we have beta readers. Early versions of software that engineers expect to be riddled with problems were called beta versions. Beta is the second letter in the Greek alphabet, so presumably, the alpha versions were kept all in-house. Betas were the first public versions ...
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Continuity Goofs: Avengers, Hunger Games and Your Novel
When my picturebook, The Journey of Oliver K. Woodman was first published, I lied to my mother-in-law. When she saw this image of Tameka writing a letter to her Uncle Ray, my MIL noticed that Tameka was left-handed. I told her that I asked the illustrator, Joe Cepeda especially to make her left handed like ...