Hunky heroes and plucky heroines in clean, contemporary, small town romances in the real — and imaginary — worlds.
What does it take to be a career writer? Several things come to mind: Patience Guts A professional mindset Hard work A thick skin Belief in yourself The ability to live on practically nothing, an ability that may only be necessary for a brief time but that might be permanent because writers today earn, on average, half of what they earned just …
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A novella falls into what used to be a creative desert between short stories and full length novels. No more. People don’t always want to give the time to reading a novel that it requires, especially since novels are getting longer and longer and longer until sometimes a reader can measure a book’s thickness in …
Many people with mental or emotional issues use creative writing to ‘write out’ their problems. The structure required to put together a creative work forces them to put structure to what they experience. That structure helps them put the problem into some kind of order and, with order, they may finally be able to make …
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Here's the cover for the first book of the Wilderness Women series, The Pathfinder. It's not published yet though it's finished because I'm giving myself a lot of time to look for typos. I've never had someone else go through my manuscripts for typos. Instead, I've always done it myself and I've discovered that I …
Continue reading The Pathfinder, book one of Wilderness Women
What book will improve your storytelling skills? Any how-to book for writers describing the hero’s journey as promoted by Joseph Conrad and how to use this method in fiction. I had such a book once upon a time but it’s long since disappeared so I went online to see if I could find it and, …
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Should you write all three books in a trilogy before publishing the first one? There are two thoughts about this: If you are an experienced author, you can do it however you wish because you know before you start how long it will take to complete the trilogy. This is important because an author should …
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Should you continue writing after receiving bad critiques? It depends…. If you never, ever receive a good critique about anything you write and you also never, ever change how you write, then maybe you should consider some other occupation. On the other hand, you might consider learning read criticism in a constructive way because that …
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What cliches should urban fantasy avoid? My answer is the purely personal preference that a story not have too many! Too many impossible magical situations. Too many different kinds of fantasy creatures. There’s a thing that’s called deus ex machina (spelling might be wrong). It refers to operas in which the story got so complicated …
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How to give characters names that can easily be distinguished from names of other characters? This is something that irritates me often. Why do so many authors give names to their characters that are so similar to other characters’ names that the reader needs a written list to keep them apart? But it happens. Try …
How is writing e-books different from writing traditional bricks-and-mortar books? Having made the transition from writing for traditional, bricks-and-mortar publishers to writing for e-publishers, I feel somewhat qualified to answer this question and can state unequivocally that here are several differences that should inform what you write and how you write it. The differences that …
Continue reading How is e-book writing different from writing a traditional print book?
