Turbulence and Abrupt Stops

1 CommentRevising, writing,

The middle section of my book came to an abrupt end, yesterday, as I realized that the scene I was writing and the scene where my main character turns herself in–we’ll say to the “police”–could be smushed into one convenient bundle, and end a whole lot of tramping around the countryside. It also ends the

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Gearing Up For Competitive Blurb Reading Season

3 Commentswriting, , ,

I’m not writing my query letter yet. I’m still looking at examples from our forerunners, and looking for something (anything) that includes a vital piece of backstory. Yes. Exactly. My novel is the exception to the “no backstory” rule. At least, I think it is. There’s one glittering hunk of backstory you can’t understand the

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Choosing Trust

4 CommentsBlogging, lifestyle, memoir, ,

A while back, I wound up trapped in a conversation with one of those I’m Telling You This For Your Own Good people. The topic was critique groups, and the woman was basically a stranger. I know you’re bracing for a horror story. So, here it is. Someone she knew stole her title. I won’t

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Deep Breath, and Very Carefully Cut…

3 CommentsUncategorized, ,

I am working my way through my rough draft, taking all those pieces of… stuff… out of the old file and putting them in chronological order in the new file. I’m also cutting out a lot of the **stuff that doesn’t happen in the revised timeline** stuff and a few tons of **wow, this is

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Organization for the City Landfill and Tidying for Writers

2 CommentsRevising, writing, , ,

I went all Moleskine-y at the beginning of the year, partly because 2016 dropped me into a dollar-store calendar with write-in dates morass, and partly because I happened to find an almost-new Moleskine in the basement, so why not? Blank pages, and the elastic’s still good. I’d never realized how important having a calendar is

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Getting Back to Work is Hard to Do

7 CommentsNovels, Revising, Short Stories, writing, , ,

Why is it that good habits are so much easier to break than bad ones? Let me lay it out for you. My pattern is this:1.) Get into a good writing habit. 2.) Stop to revise. 3.) Really, really stop to revise. Farewell, new words. 4.)  Fail to make revision a measurable part of my

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“Words,” Editing, and Tastes

10 CommentsUncategorized, ,

When I was young and poor, one of my roommates was a conservative Christian. She had one of those set-top boxes for the TV which was supposed to block swear words. It ran off of the closed captioning, and basically muted the TV for the entire time the word was on the screen. Mostly, it

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