Thanks to anyone who bought any of the reissued books in 2024. And, of course, thanks to the fine folks at Open Road Media for reissuing them. I made enough in royalties to cover the ridiculous cost to relicense the Shriekback lyric for THE NIGHT INSIDE, which I really didn’t expect would happen. After so […]

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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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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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I survived the comments from Reader #2. Most suggestions are easy to implement or require just a bit of revision. One of the areas requiring major change wasn’t a surprise at all, as I was never sure that it really worked anyway. Lots of positive comments helped, of course, so I wasn’t required to visit […]

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I’m waiting for some ‘bigger picture’ comments on the Witch Novel so thought I might as well proceed with some ‘easy’ editing. This involves searching the document for weasel words* and my own personal pet words (notably ‘dark’ and ‘pale’. God, I love those words). Weasel words include things like: suddenly, finally, merely, huge, most, […]

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Wrapped up Nanowrimo for another year and met my goal of 5,000 words. They were 5,000 pretty pathetic words and I suspect that when I start “Glass World Take Four” they will all vanish into the electronic ether, but c’est la vie. Words were typed! Goals were met! The world moves on.

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So far I’m making my target for this year’s National Novel Writing Month, but I admit that target is pretty modest: 5,000 words on the Glass World project. I’m not feeling terribly inspired and am in the “well, I have no idea what’s going on here but might as well have THIS happen” stage. The […]

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Where we left our heroine, she was recovering from Covid and a bad fall. May was promising, with a visit from a sibling, a road trip, and a long-delayed trip to Nova Scotia coming up in June. Work on the witch novel was proceeding, flamenco class had been resumed, I’d had my first writing date […]

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