Straight talk from the sisters about blood, sweat and ink
If we were having coffee, I might not be in the best mood. I would still welcome you into my home. And serve up your chosen beverage. Hot or iced? You’d know from the bags under my eyes and the fact that I’m not serving fresh baked anything, that something is very wrong. The news …
Continue reading “Coffee Share and Cat Care”
[pullquote align=”right” textalign=”left” width=”20%” ]“A lot of first-time children’s novels are too long.” Charlie Sheppard, editor of Bone Jack by Sara Crowe[/pullquote] Recently I read a post in the Guardian. They interviewed some of the top editors in children’s fiction to discover the most common mistakes made by new writers. {I’ve included a few of the …
Continue reading “Solutions for Common Writing Mistakes: Runaway Word Counts”
Today, trunking is getting a whole new round of attention. That’s because one of the most famous trunked novels of all time just hit the bookstalls. Unless you live under a WiFi-free rock, you know Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman arrived in stores yesterday. It comes to us with much-anticipated fanfare after living a …
Continue reading “Trunked! Lessons from Harper Lee about Stashing a Manuscript”
Have you ever skipped a badly written fight scene to get back to the main story? I have, and I never missed it. That’s because although fight scenes are often critical to the plot, once the blows start flying, two things often happen. Writer #1 includes too little detail and there’s no tension. We don’t …
Continue reading “10 Tips for Writing Fight Scenes”
Today starts the first day of the new Kindle Unlimited royalty program. As with so many things in life, there will be winners and losers. I gave my thoughts on the biggest KU losers last week and now I have the winners. Remember, this is just my prediction for the books that will fare the …
Continue reading “3 Book Categories that Should Benefit Under the New KU”
Last week I wrote about the royalty restructuring of the Kindle Unlimited program. The new system goes into effect July 1, 2015 and it’s going to drastically change how authors are paid when a program subscriber borrows their participating book. This new system only affects writers in the Kindle Unlimited program and authors are given …
Continue reading “4 Book Categories that may Suffer under Restructured KU”
Monday morning, June 15th, the self publishing world absorbed the shock wave from the latest Amazon announcement. In case you haven’t heard, Amazon revealed a major monetary restructuring of the royalty calculations on their Kindle Unlimited program. Unlimited is the program that allows Amazon shoppers to pay a subscription fee to borrow an unlimited number …
Continue reading “The New Kindle Unlimited Royalty Scale”
First person POV has its advantages and its drawbacks. If you love it, and many writers do, you know one of the biggest issues is the overuse of personal pronouns. If you’re not paying attention, you can end up with long passages where every other sentence starts with the same word. In those rare instances …
Continue reading “Writing Tips for 1st Person POV”
If we were having coffee, I would confess it’s been a crazy, exhausting week. We would grab seats in my garden, since I just refinished some lawn furniture for the occasion. I have some interesting news to share; I took part in PitMad this week. I suspect some of my friends don’t know about this …
Continue reading “If We Were Having Coffee: PitMad Edition”
We recently had a guest join us to talk about creating characters with good character. If you haven’t read that post, I strongly suggest you do, since creating likable characters is always a hot topic with writers. However, it turns out I’m a contrarian. I’m crazy about unlikable characters that run from those skirting the …
Continue reading “The Back-up Antagonist”