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Marvin is Quite Amazing: A Review

I live off my to-do lists. I have also tried many different ways of keeping them. I’ve tried keeping them on paper in my daily planner (I still do that), I have tried writing them on a little mini easel white board (I do that when I’ve got a ton of things I need to keep on the top of my head), and I’ve tried a number of apps on my phone and computer. There are so many to-do apps! Todoist, Things…

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Do Your End of Year Wrap-up

Usually at this time of year there are thousands of wrap-up the year blogs and articles. Maybe it’s me, but this year I’m just not seeing so many. Is it because, like me, so many have been caught off-guard by the fact that the year is already over? Or are people just tired of writing (and reading) the same thing every year? Whatever the reason, I’m not eager to buck the trend. Instead, I’m just…

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The Conflict Box

Continuing on with the theme of conflict (because I’ve been having so much trouble resolving the conflict in the book I’m writing and because the book I’m editing doesn’t have nearly enough), I was recently reminded of the conflict box. I’m not entirely sure who came up with this idea, but I know that Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer discussed it when they were co-writing Don’t Look Down, the first…

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What's a Plotter to do?

I am a die-hard believer in plotting. For the way my mind works there is no other way to write. But what to do when plotting doesn’t work? I’ve tried writing by the seat of my pants and always end up plotting a few scenes in advance, the major turning points of the story, and/or pre-writing before I actually get to the dialogue and, you know, the actual writing of the scene (pre-writing is…

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This Story Right Now

Writing a novel is not only multifaceted, complicated endeavor, it’s also a lot of fun! But one of the lessons I have come away with in my twenty year career is that no two books are the same. You don’t write them the same way, you don’t plot them the same way, hell, I don’t even use the same writing software for every book. I know there are some people who are absolutely wedded to Scrivener, and…

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Is SuperNotes Super for Authors?

I can hardly believe I am trying out yet another system for keeping track of my characters and my plot, and yet… I recently heard of a relatively newcomer to the PKMS scene (that’s Personal Knowledge Management Systems, just to remind you). The developers were very sneaky and posted on a reddit group I’m in asking people to comment on the new on-boarding video he’d created. Of course, I watched…

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Intuitive Editing: A Review

One in an occasional series of writing book reviews. Today, I’ll talk about Intuitive Editing by Tiffany Martin. I came across this book when I went to the home of a fellow author who was hosting a write-in. She had very cleverly put out all of her craft books as decoration in the center of the dining table where we were invited to sit and write. Intuitive Editing was among many books, most of…

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Writing Through Reality

No matter what your feelings are toward current events in the US, we are all feeling something. Some are happy and hopeful, some distraught and scared of what will happen in the future. But the most important question is whether you are going to allow this to affect your writing. Now, you may be saying, “What do you mean ‘allow’?!” Many people are having a really hard time focusing so deeply are…

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Backstory Timeline

It was recently brought home to me the importance of creating a timetable for my characters’ and their family’s backstory. The dates when things happened and how they interrelate can be vital to a story’s viability. And especially when writing historical fiction, you need to know not only what happened to your characters and those connected to them (friends, family) as necessary, but what was…

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I Missed My Anniversary!

I can’t believe I missed my anniversary! Well, actually, I can. My husband and I regularly miss our wedding anniversary—if it wasn’t for my mother-in-law calling to wish us a happy anniversary every year we’d never remember. But I’m not talking about that one. I’m talking about the one of January 1st of 2004 – twenty years and nearly 11 months ago. Would you believe that is the date my very first…

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Kortex: A Review

In my continuous quest for the perfect writing/PKMS (Personal Knowledge Management System) for authors, a new app has come to my attention: Kortex. (Warning: this is a pretty long post.) This is so new, they have a wait list of people who would like to give the software a try, although it’s ridiculously easy to by-pass that and get right on (I’ll tell you how later). The app hasn’t officially…

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Style Sheets

This week I want to tell you about something that you would never think would aid you as a writer, but now I can’t imagine writing or editing the work of others without it. Style sheets. What is a style sheet? Well, if you work for a publisher or a company that produces a lot of written work, you’ll know that a lot of companies have their own style sheet. These are company-wide rules of grammar…

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Writing to Your Strengths

Image by Casey Colton on Deviant Art I am a very strong believer in trying new things—whether it be a new food, a new experience, or something new with your writing. With just about every book I write, I try to use a new tool or a new way of organizing my writing. I try new programs—Scrivener, Atticus, Novlr, or Plottr. I use a virtual notebook, or a physical one. I write long hand, or type away…

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Showing Emotion

Continuing on with the Emotion Theme: We’ve all been there: reading a book, looking forward to the exciting bit where the hero(ine) really gets to show their chops. We know it’s coming, and we’ve been looking forward to it since we figured out that they’ve got to stand strong and do whatever it is that needs to be done. And then it happens—the big fight, the luscious kiss, whatever it is—and…

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Bringing Emotion

When I first started writing, I was told that if my character cried on the page, my reader wouldn’t. If I wanted to bring tears to my reader’s eyes, my character’s eyes needed to be dry while they were completely torn up inside. As with every “Rule” of writing, you can take this one with a grain of salt. But there are still things you need to think about when you’re writing something so…

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Why rebuild the wheel? There’s a template for that!

Two of the most popular apps used in fiction writing are Scrivener and Plottr. Scrivener is incredibly powerful and wide-ranging having so many features most authors don’t even use half of them. Plottr is more simple but getting broader in scope all the time. The thing is, no matter which program you use, you’ll need to organize your work somehow. That’s where templates come in. Other authors…

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An Entrepreneurial Failure

According to the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School, two-thirds of all startups fail. Another statistic cited is that 90% of startups fail within five years. Publishing companies are not only not immune to this, they probably start and fail faster than other types of businesses. Why? Well, for a number of possible reasons, but the two most common are: -the publisher…