Never Ending Editing

Never Ending Editing

One of the hardest things for new authors to know is when their book is finished. You might think that when you write those lovely words, “The End”, that would be the end of the book, but experienced writers know that, in fact, for many, that’s just the mid-point in...
Getting Through the Mid-Book Slump

Getting Through the Mid-Book Slump

The mid-book slump. We all experience it. In the past week, I’ve seen three people on Facebook asking others for advice on this phenomenon. They’ve written to the middle or nearly to the middle of their book and they’re bored or they’ve run out of ideas or they’re...
Looking at the big picture

Looking at the big picture

I love it when someone blows my mind with an entirely new concept I had never even conceived of before. This happened to me recently when a prolific friend of mine told me that he doesn’t count how many words he writes day-to-day. He doesn’t count how many words he...
Google maps is great but…

Google maps is great but…

Google maps is great, but there is no substitute for actually being there. That was my lesson this past week. A few weeks ago, my husband told me he needed to be in London for a conference for a few days and asked if I wanted to join him. Naturally, I jumped at the...
Missing Chekov’s Gun

Missing Chekov’s Gun

Last week in the discussion on the Writers’ Block Party Podcast with Kathy Seidel on the motifs and themes used in my book A Token of Love and Pru Warren’s book Ellen and the Would-Be Gigolo, there was one important concept that we briefly discussed—Chekov’s Gun. Pru...
Deliberate Motifs

Deliberate Motifs

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...