carlisdm

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About the Last Families

About the Last Families

“The Last Families” is the title that I decided to give my fantasy novel. This is the first piece of fantasy I have ever tried to write. Since I didn’t feel confident to do the research required to place my story in a specific location, I decided to give the fantasy genre a shot. I soon realized that I felt comfortable with creating my own world. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com After doing some…

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Self-publishing time

I always told myself that I would explore the different approaches to publishing. The first one, traditional publishing, seemed to be the desired one since you imagine a literary agent guiding you in these waters of publishing. You imagine them taking care of all the logistics that is involved in publishing your book so you can focus in more writing. But as I already knew, nailing a literary…

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The querying process: trust your instincts

The querying process: trust your instincts

As I submerge myself in this world of querying agents and receiving rejections, I started to take it as part of the common writing process. I no longer feel bad for the rejections coming from literary agent’s, in fact, I think they are making me stronger and more resilient. Photo by Stas Knop on Pexels.com In the meantime, I’ve also started to experiment with different query letters, manuscript…

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From writing to doing my first 5K challenge

From writing to doing my first 5K challenge

I’ve always wanted to participate of the wwwp5K Movement challenge with great 3 charities to support, but each year, there was always something going on the day people were supposed to do it. This year, the challenge extended to the whole month, so I told myself there were no more excuses. Now as a background, I’m no experienced jogger/runner. I jog from time to time, maybe a couple of times per…

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Resiliency at Covid-19 times

Resiliency at Covid-19 times

I know this is a writing blog, but it is hard to be a writer without acknowledgement of what is going around us. This past days have been hard. It is no longer other people dying of Covid19 but people that you already know 😦 and happening to closest people, the cousin of my closest friend, the uncle of another friend, a friend of my mom and so on 😦

Photo by Evelyn Chong on Pexels.com

Neve…

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Writing after professional editing/copywriting

I decided to give it a go to professional editing of my manuscript. After getting a good hunch on a video from this editor, I paid for it and waited an external/unknown person to finally take a look at my manuscript. I wasn’t expecting much as I knew I had picked a considerable affordable service. I thought it would be mostly about grammar, spelling, punctuation, verb tenses, sentence structure,…

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Writing in confinement

I haven’t written in my Blog in while, as always. I wanted to focus any writing effort to working on my manuscript. I finally finished doing my second round of editing review, and now I don’t feel guilty to swift my attention to other type of writing.

From all the bad things that this confinement has brought to our lives, there is one that has been positive for me. I have been able to find…

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Who knows, Ragnar, what the gods have in store for us. But this, I can never imagine. If you have gone to Heaven, then we will never meet again. And yet, I think Odin will ride like the wind, and rescue you, and take you to Valhalla, where you belong, my own sweet Ragnar. And there, there we shall meet again, and fight and drink and… love one another.

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Writing in a bad year

Writing in a bad year

2019 has definitely been a year to remember. Two dear aunts, sisters from my Mom, passed away. My beautiful dog, Dana, who was with me for more than 14 years, also passed away. There was a fire, caused by short circuit on the TV plug, that devoured my Mom’s room and almost killed her. My closest aunt had an accident with a huge wardrobe falling and splitting her head badly. My country went into

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Writing in Bolivian Dictatorship

Writing in Bolivian Dictatorship

I never been interested in politics, neither being active in it. Being Bolivian, I’m surrounded by latin-american literature influenced mostly by our turbulent political history. This is social literature that is marked mostly by conflicts and our disastrous governments. I didn’t understand well the impact of these events in literature until the last 3 weeks in my country. Social and political…

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Editing methods

After a general revision of my manuscript – where I wanted to make sure that the story, plot and characters made sense – I’ve started a new round of more in depth revision/editing of my writing. To be honest, I wasn’t actually looking to this stage. I still have memories of endless rounds of editing in a previous manuscript that didn’t end that well (that project is now on standby for the…

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People revising your manuscript

People revising your manuscript and the thoughts that circle your mind

My previous post was published more than 3 months ago. I remember telling myself: I won’t distract myself from any other kind of writing until I have my current first manuscript ready. I originally targeted to finish it by January and Look! we’re almost in the middle of the year. Sigh… It took longer than expected but it’s finally done.

I initially had one friend volunteering to read it. She…

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One paragraph at a time in a never ending editing process

One paragraph at a time in a never ending editing process

I finally finished my first manuscript of a fantasy novel I’ve been working for almost a year. I learned many lessons the last time I worked with a manuscript, one is that finishing the first manuscript is only a small step in achieving a readable book. Numerous rounds of editing and revision come after this, and they can become endless. They are not the nicest part of writing a book, at least…

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Unusual schedules as a Happiness Engineer A little bit of my personal schedule at work and how I fit writing into it 🙂

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Reviewing, plotting and just writing

Why would I need to be either a plotter or a pantser? Why I had to decide between editing while writing or editing everything at the end? My search to find the right methodology

Plotter or pantser

When I started writing, I found the question about being a “plotter or a pantser”. Plotter would be the person that plans the story before they write and a pantser would be the person that only lets the inspiration guide and build the story as they write. Initially, I was sure I would fit the plotter role, I wanted to set up everything correctly before starting to write. It…

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Book review: On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser

Book review: On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser

I usually wouldn’t have selected this book if it weren’t for a reading club at my work. We wanted to improve our writing as part of improving our communication skills –  most of it is written. But why wouldn’t I pick this book if one of my main passions is writing? Because the book is directed towards nonfiction writing and when thinking of myself as a writer, I believe I’m mostly labeled as a…