Mid-Winter, Mid-Novel, Mid-Revision Blues

querying, Revising, winter, writing

I’m in a funk, right now. Maybe it’s the long nights of winter. Maybe it’s the endless tedium at the day job, or maybe it’s just the latest mid-novel slog. The thing is, I am making progress. I’m writing. I’m revising. I’m even typing those pesky handwritten pages that seem to multiply around me. Morale

READ MORE

Of Dragons and Personal Opinion

4 CommentsRevising, writing, , ,

The comments on my story for last month’s StoryTime Blog Hop have me thinking about the difference between objective criticism and personal opinion. Wanna get more specific? There is too much baby-eating in this story. –Roughly half the people who read the story. There is exactly the right amount of baby-eating in this story. –The

READ MORE

Index Cards and Coffee Might Save My Life

rants, Revising, writing

The wind is blowing in hard and cold, and you can hear it creeping around between the houses. This is the week it’s finally supposed to get really, truly, properly cold. I’m not that much of a winter person, and even less so, when it’s cold and cloudy. I worked my way through a bunch

READ MORE

The Festival of Queries: A Writerly Celebration of Death

querying, Revising, writing

I’m finishing up my revision, and that means it’s time to start the weeping an gnashing of teeth Uhm… working on a query letter. So, this is the process by which we take the novel–all 100 thousand words of it–and cram it into a post-it note, or better yet, a postage stamp. That’s an exaggeration,

READ MORE

Software Death Match: YWriter vs Scrivener

8 CommentsRevising, writing, ,

The first writing software I ever used was Simon Haynes’ Ywriter. By then, I’d finished a novel in Microsoft Word–one huge, unending  scroll of a document–and I was mired in revising. I knew I needed something different. YWriter is what I found. It’s free, and the guy who programmed it is a writer, himself, so

READ MORE

Excitement and Rising Early

2 CommentsRevising, writing

I get up early so I can get a little writing in before work. And I work early, so, that means I’m up early. I rolled out of bed–no alarm needed–around 3 o’clock this morning. And that was after common sense and discipline informed me that waking up at 2 would just be overkill. I’m

READ MORE

%d bloggers like this: