There are two things about me that regular readers of this blog are already familiar with. One is my love of professional-wresting and the other is my love of all things Star Trek (except for the J. J. Abrams remakes. They never happened in my world-view.) And I won’t even shy away from the fact […]
1 in 20,000 (but 1 is all it takes)
I was looking over some past tweets of one of the literary agents I follow on Twitter and she mentioned that she’s received over 20,000 queries so far this year. 20,000. And it’s only July. So once I read that, a whole group of thoughts and emotions popped into my head. The first was: “Holy […]
Why you should attend a book fair (even if you don’t sell any books)
Last weekend, local book sellers, authors, and publishers got together to brave the (seemingly) 115 degree Nebraska weather and put on a book festival. It was the Nebraska Book Festival 2017, and it was a really cool event, even with the terrible heat. I attended and was stationed at the Nebraska Writers Guild table. We […]
The most used words in my novels
The other day I told someone an submission editor at a place I sent something to counted the number of “that”s on the first page and included that in the rejection now. I just remembered that I was wrong. The word he counted was “was”. And the number was 34. Even in this small post […]
Seven Dialogue Don’ts
As I continue working through the outline of the first book of a planned trilogy, I started drafting out a few of the scenes that seemed the most relevant to the overall plot and character arcs. One of these scenes was a little more dialogue-heavy than I envisioned. Not a big deal, since it’s literally […]
Five Links Friday 7/7/17
Hey, it’s Friday! And, dang, I nearly missed it. Here are five links for ya’ll. 1. Let’s start with a look at irony from Reedsy.com in a great, informative post, with lot’s of examples: Learn What Irony (Really) Is and How To Use It. 2. Get that first draft written! Here is Victoria Griffin with […]
The most important thing
I was talking about Stephen King’s Dark Tower series the other day and what I liked and disliked about it. (Okay, it was mostly what I disliked, but still…) Like a lot of King’s novels, the books in the Dark Tower series are often way too long, too slow, and full of too many pointless […]
Storytelling, NES-Style
You know what’s crazy? When I first started writing, the idea of plotting seemed foreign to me. I didn’t see any need to come with a defined problem-conflict-solution. I just thought that seemed archaic in a sense. And then when I heard about some of the more complicated plotting methods, such as the hero’s journey, […]
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