Deliberate Motifs

May 15, 2022 | Blog, Method, WIP, Writing, Writing Craft

On the Writers’ Block Party Podcast, we recently had Kathleen Gilles Seidel back to speak with us about repeated motifs (note: this won’t air for a few weeks, sorry!). I wrote about them on this blog a couple of months ago, but Kathy did something unique: she...

What your characters need most

May 1, 2022 | Blog, WIP, Writing, Writing Craft

As you know, if you’ve been following this blog, I’ve been going through some personal unpleasantness recently. I was living in Kyiv just before the war started and have been moving around in uncertainty since. My apartment in Kyiv is in a spot that easily could be...

Writing Out of Order

Apr 24, 2022 | Blog, Method, WIP, Writing

Are you a logical think? A top-down sort of person, or do you allow your mind to just go wherever it wants (or perhaps it just does without your permission)? I’ve always considered myself a very logical sort of thinker. I do very well in logic puzzles and took to...

When it’s hard to write

Jan 30, 2022 | Blog, Method, WIP, Writing

I don’t know how many of you know this but I now live in Kyiv, Ukraine. You might have heard about it recently in the news? About 120,000 Russian troops are now surrounding the country on three sides and more are coming to both the Russian-Ukraine border and being...

Linear Writing — or not?

Oct 31, 2021 | Blog, Method, WIP, Writing

Are you a linear writer? Do you start at the beginning of your story and write straight through to the end? Or are you the sort of person who writes whatever scenes you can envision no matter where in the story the scene takes place? I’ve always been a rather top-down...

Writing Every Day

Oct 24, 2021 | Blog, Method, WIP, Writing

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the speed at which I write. Since signing a contract with a small publisher for three books and a Christmas novella, I’ve been stressing about my writing a lot more than I’ve had to do since I went indie. As an indie author, I...