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...]
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...]
I’m having lots of warm, fuzzy feelings while finally reading a book I picked up by chance last summer. The book is Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, by Elizabeth George, author of over a dozen great mystery novels. Part of the reason I’m enjoying it is that I can [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...]
These are my opinions; not necessarily anyone else's. 1. Don't obsess on the opening. Some people spend all kinds of time working on the opening to their book when they're starting the first draft. Usually, that's a waste of time, because by the time you finish the book, you will likely have a totally different [Read more...]
I can read other people's openings and select those I think are great and those that don't work for me, but the rubber really hits the road when I have to create an opening myself. In addition, the only openings I know well enough to explain are my own. So I'll try to explain a [Read more...]
Everyone is different, and what you like to read might not be what I like. However, I expect most of us can agree on what not to do in the opening of your novel or short story. Openings that don't even begin to grab me, and which I would give a 1 on a scale [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...]
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