With Ulterior Motive at a friend's who is an editing whiz (she should do this professionally!) and the Gingerbread Man currently being reviewed and critiqued by friends/fellow writing colleagues, the question is, which manuscript should I tackle next?

It could take a few months before Ulterior Motive is back to me to rewrite, and same with the Gingerbread Man so querying them might actually not be feasible until beginning of 2012. Perhaps that's not a bad thing. With so many literary agent pow...
Continue reading ...

This year my writing world has been productive. More productive than it has been in the last 3 1/2 years (basically since I started & finished my bachelor's program). This summer I made it a point to get more involved in the industry. 

 I read from the genre I love to write in and completed the entire Sigma Force series, the entire Millennium series (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series), and tried as best I could to get through Oryx and Crake. I'm all for a apocalyptic stories, whether the ...
Continue reading ...

For every writer, the process of creation is different. What inspires us is unique. The birth of a story, the whispers of a character, all come to us in a potpourri of ways. I recently attended a mini-writers conference with a fellow writer and good friend, Eisley Jacobs. The meetup was free--Sacramento Writers Who Mean Business, hosted by these lovely ladies (known as the Michel(l)es) --and the key note speaker was an author of a middlegrade book, Karen Kostlivy. She spoke to us of her journ...
Continue reading ...

A dirge of bloated brass and gut-rattling bass is playing as I march a quasi funeral parade with Brandt Bogue to the Boneyard Bayou. Call of Bone is going to purgatory until I can figure out how to better make use of the story line. 

I'm not being lazy.

I promise.

I'm not blaming writer's block on the unwillingness to focus harder on the story. It's just that it simply isn't going to work the way I want it to. And if I'm going to keep up with my "make as many manuscripts marketable" for my Query...
Continue reading ...

School ruined me.

Once prolific, my creativity dried up into a bitter jaded raisin. After the pressures of writing 500 - 1100+ papers on the monotony of such entertaining subjects like organization communication, that blank page syndrome became more of a psychosis when I sat down to write for fun. The pressure and anxiety of having to purge out some type of acceptable drivel full of buzzwords such as paradigm shift, drilling down and thinking outside the box killed all innovation or hope to mu...

Continue reading ...

So, yeah. About that novel. Ahem. Supposed to finish it, I thought. This last weekend. Writer's block and all. Well, that wen't...badly.

I didn't even crack it open. For one, I don't have a lap top {an aside: in fact, I just bought one of these in almost perfect working condition (just needs grease) and according to its serial number, it's a 100 year old typerwriter--and no, I'm not an anti-tech person, quite the opposite, we just don't have the funds for a lap top}, and finding a print place ...
Continue reading ...

So, I'm stuck. I'm stuck and unsatisfied. Despite all efforts I'm where I was six months ago with the Gingerbread. Unhappy, forcing things unnaturally and because of that, parts of the story are implausible. To remedy this, I braved the sweltering heat and bought four books in the genre I write.

I had, for a long time, eyed this one particular book. More drawn to the story of the author, I decided to pick up Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. At first, I wasn't impressed. It remi...

Continue reading ...

Wow. This is more rough draft than I thought. Call of Bone was written in outline form about a year and half ago. Not only have I progressed as a writer, but the outline was written so quickly based on a fleeting whim that as I flesh it out I see where some things are not working. Aside from blaring holes, it seems that it will be wordcount short--something I'm sure I can fix easily with my verboseness.

I am telling myself not to get too emotionally attached to the outline, as it's obvious it ...
Continue reading ...

I have to remember that this isn't a final draft I'm polishing. CoB was half-way finished when life interrupted writing a year ago. Now that I've been getting back into writing making my pieces marketable, when I'm completing the rough draft of CoB, I spend too much time rereading/revising and editing on the spot. I need to stop doing that or this will never get finished.

June has whipped by and I feel like I'm a little behind because I forgot how much was actually left to finish CoB. Hopeful...
Continue reading ...

I forgot what a fast read GBM is. Because of the constantly switching point of views and the hyper-drive action, the 80K thriller is a read-in-one-day kind of story. That made revising it (and rereading it to find the character's voices again) also very fast. I made notes where I want to change things and go back and elaborate more to flesh out a stronger character or thicker plot, so once I complete THE ending my re-write and edit will be that much more streamlined.

As I mentioned before, I ...
Continue reading ...

Ulterior Motive is as done as it's going to get. After revising it further, tightening it up and tweaking sections (not to mention finding lame grammatical errors and correcting them) UM is now 104K. I'll wait for the consensus to come back to see if there's further points I can edit.

I had to finish fleshing out the new story idea (Political Thriller) and my outline for the Zombie Apocalypse as those two things were preventing me from focusing on the very end of UM.

I am so excited to dive in...
Continue reading ...

Ever take an art class and you're working on your masterpiece, whether it be oil or pastels or even acrylic and you're just not as happy with it if you add just one more thing? Or you try too hard to make it perfect and end up spoiling the art? I feel like that's where I'm at with Ulterior Motive. Currently it's in the hands of three people; one, a writer, another an avid reader, and the third an English major (I'm a glutton for punishment), but despite this, I've already made changes after t...

Continue reading ...

Characters. Antagonists and protagonists, supporting and unimportant--we all have them. But how do we get them? How do we name them? The all seem to have their own unique personalities with minds of their own who hijack scenes and steal the plotline from you. They live inside us like some sort of latent personality disorder and are all distinct individuals. How do they get there?

Who is our inspiration for our characters? For me, they all seem to possess elements of people I know. I think it's...

Continue reading ...