Hey! It’s been a busy month. After the Women’s Expo last month, Jeremy and I visited Portland for the first time, where we hit 12 breweries in 3.5 days (photos here) — quite an accomplishment, we’re told — and then Camp NaNoWriMo began and I started my next novel! This is a completely new story …
writing / editing
Editing, Guest Posting, and Breaking That Pesky Circle
Editing has been my theme lately! I guest posted on Kai Strand’s blog and talked about editing (hop on over to Strands of Thought to read my post) AND I finished the second draft of FADED. Boom. I’m not expecting it back from my next reader/editor until the end of February so that means I …
Things I Learned While Writing a Trilogy
Over the holidays, I finished the first draft of FADED, the third book in The Flicker Effect trilogy. HOORAY! Feedback from my first two readers has been positive, and it’s going to my hard-core editor in February. Here’s the not-yet-finalized blurb: Biz didn’t think life could get worse after she tried—and failed—to stop a horrific …
2015 Goal: Breaking Out of My Circle
If you know me at all, you know that I don’t believe in new year’s resolutions. If you want to change something about yourself I think you should just do it—waiting for a date on a calendar is just another form of procrastination. Last year in mid-March I decided to lose weight, and six months …
Meet My Character: Biz Clement from the Flicker Effect series
Welcome to the Meet My Character Blog Tour, where you get to learn a little about my main character, Biz, from FLICKER, FRACTURE, and the still-in-the-works FADED. Special thanks to my BFF Stacey Graham, who forced nominated me to join the fun! Her post introduces you to Clementine, the character in the novel she’s writing, …
10K, Okay!
FADED, book three in the Flicker Effect trilogy, is my fifth novel (sixth full-length manuscript), and one of the things I’ve learned over the course of writing a half dozen books is I don’t feel like I’m officially into the draft until I’ve passed the 10,000 word mark. I started writing this draft when I published FRACTURE at the end of June, and as of yesterday I can finally declare this draft a WIP!
Take This Draft and Shove It
It’s been a very hectic several months, which I’ll get into in another post, but today I’m here to tell you that I’ve finished Fracture! If you recall, I said something similar while buried under three feet of snow, but since then I’ve tackled four rounds of revisions, the most strenuous of which I completed today! I’ve added roughly 3500 words, which is nearly fourteen pages, and I’m really proud of how this novel has developed.
Outlines, Plug-Ins, and Beta Readers — Oh My!
Hi everyone! There’s a lot going on in my writing world, starting with yesterday’s exciting accomplishment: I downloaded the Kindle plug-in for Adobe InDesign that allows you to format an ebook from the page layout program. This may not seem exciting to you, but as a designer I pride myself on figuring out how to do things on my own (well, I pride myself on that in all walks of life. My dad used to fret that he raised me to be “too independent”, but that’s another story for another time) so formatting my own ebook is important to me.
When Inspiration Strikes
Ideas are a very important part of a creative person’s life, be they a writer, designer, or someone just looking to redecorate their office. All three of those labels apply to me, but I only have trouble generating ideas for the first one.
People often ask “where do you get your ideas?” A common writerly response is something snarky, along the lines of “from the idea book” or “I have a monthly subscription to Ideas-R-Us”, when actually writers get idea from everyone and everything. The entire world is fair game.
The Importance of Beta Readers
For those of you who are NOT writers, a beta reader is someone who reads a draft of your manuscript to tell you where you’ve screwed up and how to make it better. Some even tell you where they laughed out loud, gasped, or wanted to punch a character (thanks Nadine!).
Dictionary.com defines the slang version of beta as: