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You heard right. Today through Tuesday, September 2nd, you, your loved ones, your friends, your acquaintances, your coworkers, that lady who makes your coffee in the morning, the guy who nods hello to you on the subway home, your son’s preschool teacher, your daughter’s softball coach, your personal trainer, your spiritual leader, your local congresswoman, …
Despite my vacation, I did manage to do a few writing-related things…
Interviews
I’m a featured guest blogger at All the Write Notes, which is a music site that features writing, or a writing site that features music — however you want to look at it. In my article ATWN Guest Post: YA Author, Melanie Hooyenga – The Pressure of Number Two: Let Lorde Lead the Way I talk about the pressures of writing a sequel and how Lorde’s music helped push me along.
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!
A recently published article bashing YA as a lesser form of literature has been making the rounds, as have numerous rebuttals defending YA. My favorite is by Rob Moran, titled Men Should Be Able to Read YA Too, where he states, “…Gordon seems to view reading as a means to an end, rather than an activity in its own right…
I’m thrilled to announce that Fracture is now available on Amazon! Today you can only get the ebook, but tomorrow (probably in the evening) the print version will also be available!
Things I learned (or remembered) while prepping this book for publication:
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.
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.
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.
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:
Happy almost new year! I hope everyone had a nice holiday and is ready to close out 2013 with a bang. The first draft of Fracture is currently with a couple beta readers and while I wait to hear back from them, I’m brainstorming the yet-to-be-titled Book 3 in the series. I know the overall …