I spent some time digging through old storage boxes in an attempt to find the cache of my old lyrics, written in my teens and early twenties when I wanted to be in a band. My hope was that were would be something decent enough to pass on to my husband to use in one […]

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Status update #1: still no title! Before we went away to Spain, I sent the latest draft to a freelance editor (a friend of a friend, just starting out) to get some feedback from a fresh pair of eyes with no ties to me. She came back with some very helpful comments and suggestions. In […]

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Almost every book of advice on writing will tell you to read your work aloud. I find lots of advice to be either incompatible with my wonky process (yes, I can draw a plot graph but it never seems to help) or completely impossible (write my entire book again, from scratch, for the second draft? […]

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Made my 10,000 word target – though the usual quality caveats apply. I’m definitely feeling my way through this part, stranded in a world of foggy details, mysterious motivations, and uncertain outcomes. Though it was rather fun brainstorming oddities that one might find in an imaginary world made of glass. My mantra was BE WEIRDER! […]

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Well, it could be worse. I’m about 600 words behind target, mostly because I had one of those “wait, no, she can’t possibly know X at this point, because that will change how she relates to Y” moments and that threw me right off. In the end, I decided to just bull on ahead, assumes […]

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For various reasons, I didn’t sign up to do Nanowrimo this year – so I’m doing Notnowrimo instead. My goal is the usual 10,000 words and so far I’m on target. Also as usual, no guarantees of quality and likelihood of surviving a purge are offered. I’m working on the Glass World novel until the […]

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While the Witch Novel is off being reviewed by my third reader, I’ve been going through my notes for the Glass World project to see if I can turn it into something that makes sense. I found a note about the stages of my writing (which must have been part of a book exercise, because […]

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In theory. I’m on version #3 right now, which is somewhat frustrating. I know what has to happen, but I’m struggling with the balance of ‘show vs. tell’ (no, Nancy, you cannot just narrate all the sections you don’t feel like writing …. or can I?) and finding the final paragraphs. One of my challenges […]

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Things are moving along towards the reissue of the four novels from Open Road Media. I’ve seen both the covers (gorgeous, once the top hat is gone!) and the promotional ‘jacket copy’ (is that what you call it when there are no jackets?). It’s always fascinating to see how different artists approach the covers. I’ve […]

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I’ve finished the first round of serious line editing on the Witch Novel and now I need to buckle down and make the more serious changes needed. And maybe think of a name for the damned thing. In poking around my folder of miscellaneous writing advice, I came across some exercises I did from WONDERBOOK […]

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