Experience the thrill of your novel taking shape! Make March a writing month

Write like my life depends on it in the month of March!!!

What Inspires Your Writing?

Before warm weather hits full force and spring fever sets in, take a month to write a solid chunk of your book.

You’ve heard of it, now make sure you’re officially registered for it: The 10K Word Count Writing Challenge, starting this Wednesday!

Your mission: write 10,000 words. That’s a handful of paragraphs each day?and if you can do that, you’ll have taken a major step toward becoming a published novelist.

If you have an outline, character sketches, even words already written, bring them along. As long as you write 10,000 new words in March, you’ll be a Challenge finisher.

You could also be the recipient of a writing award. Will March 2017 go down as the month you became an award-winning writer?

It’s exciting to see your own novel take shape. In fact, I’m excited to see your novel take shape!

Get your words on, writer:

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The Seven Deadly Sins of Prologues—What Doesn’t Work and What Does

To Prologue or Not to Prologue?
Thou shalt not if . . . (read to find out what Kristen Lamb has to say about the subject).

Kristen Lamb's Blog

We writers have a vast array of tools at our disposal to craft stories readers will love. But like any tool, it helps if we know how to use it properly. Theme is wonderful. It can keep us plunging a story’s depths for years when used correctly. Applied incorrectly? It just makes a story annoying and preachy.

Description! Love me some description! But pile on too much and we can render a story unreadable.

The same can be said of prologues. Now, before we get into this, I want to make it clear that certain genres lend themselves to prologues. But even then, we are wise to make sure the prologue is serving the story.

So, to prologue or not to prologue? That is the question.

The problem with the prologue is it has kind of gotten a bad rap over the years, especially with agents. They generally hate them…

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Dear Writer: STOP Releasing So Many Novels!

Marvelous quote from Michael Cristiano’s post “What’s the rush for? Take your time. Be the aged cheddar of the publishing industry: digestible and dependable and a classic. Be the brie: smooth and double-creamed served with red pepper jam. Hell, be blue cheese: an acquired taste but oh-so-prolific. Just don’t be processed cheese. Got it?”

Thank you, Michael. Because with three sons (teenager and two toddlers) and a husband I have been stressing myself out in between working full-time and trying to write, publish new stories, AND re-publish a novel when it was abandoned after publisher went out of business! Oy!

A Writer's Path

by Michael Cristiano

As I’m sure you know, dear readers (or Mom… Hi, Mom!), I’ve come to a couple realizations over the past year or so since the release of my first novel. The biggest revelation, the one where I decided to go back to writing for myself, I’ve written about extensively already, and you can read that post here…

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Building Your World With Maps

Hallelujah! I had created a map of the world of Reath, for my "Prelude to Morning" dystopian-science-fiction hybrid (lol) and I think I need to redraw it on a bigger scale like this awesome author did! So inspiring. Thank you, Burks! Thank you!

How to Be Taken Seriously as a Writer

Note to self: “Don’t downplay your accomplishments”! #MotivationMonday

A Writer's Path

by Kate Colby

So writing is your creative calling, your life’s purpose, your ultimate joy. Congratulations! You’re part of (in my totally unbiased opinion) one of the best groups of people in the world. You know it, I know it — and yet, your friends and family don’t.

After all, what’s so special about being a writer? Literally billions of people on the planet write every day. It’s a basic life skill, one of the first we learn. And as a career? Psh! You might as well steal a cardboard box from behind your local grocery store and get comfy on the street.

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Thank You to Everyone Who Helped Me Win on Cover Wars!

And the winner is . . . Charles French! Groovy, baby. 🙂

charles french words reading and writing

Thank you to everyone who helped me in this Cover Wars contest at authorshout.com.  I know that I was a bit of a pest with my posts about voting for me, so  I do apologize if I went overboard.  To all who helped me with voting and with excellent suggestions on how to reach people–Thank you!!! I have received a great deal of aid from my wife, family, friends, and friends from the wonderful community I have found at WordPress.

(https://pixabay.com)

I also want to thank Judy Bullard at customebookcovers@cox.net for her wonderful work on my book. I will certainly work with her again, and I give her my highest recommendation.

 

Please follow the following links to find my novel:

ebook

Print book

Thank you!

The book trailer:

Maledicus:Investigative Paranormal Society Book I

My radio interview:

interview

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#BlackLivesMatter

This thoughtful post is almost a year old and still highly relevant.

L.S. Engler

I usually don’t like to get too political on my blog. The current state of things is such a confusing mess that even I’m not sure what my thoughts are, and there are things like our current racial division in the U.S. that makes me feel upset, confused, and generally voiceless. I’m a white girl who grew up in rural Michigan, so it sometimes feels like I just don’t have a good perspective on things. On the other hand, I live just outside of Chicago, where the murder rate from gun violence is just absolutely staggering. I have family members who work in law enforcement, so the attacks on police grip my heart with a very personal kind of terror, while the reports of young black people being straight-up murdered just for being young and black is heartbreaking. It’s all so awful that I’m often just stunned into complete silence…

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My Daughter Punched Out James Patterson

Heh, heh. I love this author’s sense of humor.

Dysfunctional Literacy

(image via wikimedia)

My daughter didn’t really punch out James Patterson.  She punched out a life-sized cardboard figure of James Patterson.  The James Patterson had been placed near the entrance of B&M Booksellers next to a table with several of Patterson’s new books (I don’t remember which books they were because he has so many of them at any given moment).

Even if my daughter doesn’t like James Patterson, it wasn’t her life-sized cardboard figure to punch out.  It was the book store’s.  And that’s what caused the problem.

I saw part of the violent act from the corner of my eye as we entered the store.  I intentionally was avoiding the Patterson cut-out when my youngest daughter blurred past me and knocked it down with her fist.  It must have been a solid punch.  She didn’t get that from me.  I punch like a girl, but I guess that…

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What type of Reader are you?

I'm a patient, forgiving reader. I know what it's like for my writing to be analyzed and torn apart. And even when it's for the better, it's an exercise an misery. LOL. So, give me your slow beginnings and your unlikable characters! Give me your sometimes cliched plot twists. I will read it, I will …

DO BLACK PEOPLE REALLY DO THIS STUFF? Manga and Anime

I’m an anime and manga fanatic and enjoyed reading this. 🙂

Chronicles of Harriet

Amber; cover by James Eugene; from the YA novel by Milton Davis

Yesterday, it was announced that author Milton Davis, Yours Truly and artist Sarah Bowman (Macklin) – known worldwide as S-Sama – will collaborate to create the manga version of Amber, a YA novel penned by Milton Davis.

Milton will publish; I will write the graphic script and Sarah will illustrate the work.

For those who are scratching their heads, wondering just what the heck ‘manga’ is, ask any teenager in the world and they can tell you. If no teenager is nearby, read on.

‘Manga’ is the Japanese word commonly used as the name of the genre for all comic books or graphic novels published in Japan. Manga has a certain style, recognizable in its artwork and in its literary tropes.

While manga is typically read by…

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