I’ve been working hard each day this week to find time to do a little work on my writing, even if it’s just 15 minutes a day. Doesn’t matter what I work on as long as I do something! Tonight, I started thinking about my next Manziuk and Ryan Mystery. I know what the setting [Read more...]
Yesterday I talked about the fact that as writers, we may all have very different goals depending on our personalities, ages, writing abilities, interests, and so forth. Today, I want to look at identifying the steps to take to reach your goal. Let’s say you want to write a novel that will get published by [Read more...]
Okay, I have taken Trevel's suggestion and dropped the "and Her Friends" and the Part 1 bit.Trevel is one of my primary editors and is usually right. :) New cover.
I did it! Wrote a fantasy chapter book for my granddaughters in time for Christmas. Even managed three edits. This is the working cover I used on the Advance Reading Copy of the book. Of course, things did change a little bit along the way. The original goal was to come up with a story [Read more...]
“I would read other books, of course,” wrote the novelist Neil Gaiman, “but in my heart I knew that I read them only because there wasn’t an infinite number of Narnia books.” My son sent me that quotation the other day. Partly because he knows I’m a big fan of the Narnia books, too, and [Read more...]
So you have written a book, but you're not ready to learn about the realities of the publishing world? You want a major publisher, preferably American, and that's that? If that's the case, then you may want to try to find an American agent.And it so happens that I know someone who gives great advice [Read more...]
Continued from the previous blogs, "Is there still a need for Christian bookstores in Canada" and "Need for Canadian Christian bookstores – SWOT analysis" ‘I actually never saw a Christian bookstore until I was in my early twenties) or knew they existed.) If there were any in south-western Manitoba, they weren’t in my neighbourhood. I believe [Read more...]
Why is it that when I'm not at my computer and can't write anything down, I get all these great ideas for blogs, and then when i sit down at the computer, they just evaporate as if they were only a figment of my imagination? Okay, maybe the ideas will come back… Oh, yeah. I [Read more...]
I have a few more favorite openings I thought I'd post. Some of them are the kind that make you feel something terrible is coming, but others promise something different – fun, for instance. The trick is that whatever you promise in your opening (suspense, humour, romance, an engaging quest), you deliver in the rest [Read more...]
I'm continuing to post openings that I consider very strong. Now, since we're all different, what grabs me may not grab you. But I'll try to tell you why they grab me. And you might learn from that. “A cold wind blew off Hanging Dog Mountain and I had no fire, nor dared I strike [Read more...]
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