What's on the iPod: Inhale|Woven

What's on the Nightstand: The Weird Sisters|Eleanor Brown

Save the Words Word of the Day: Divinipotent (adj) Having strong divinitory powers

Would you believe I just about committed literary suicide? When the muse made her abrupt departure and nothing but bitter flavored my mouth whenever I thought about the inevitable formulaic drivel HERO made me feel I had lurking in thousands of pages on my computer, I no longer kept track of my flash drive that held the orig...
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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...
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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...

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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 ...
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Part of being an author is critiquing. Not just your own stuff, but your peers. Your partners in scribe, your sounding boards, the only people in the world who seem to GET you. One of the many kernels of advice given to me by published authors is to have your manuscript read by as many people as possilbe. Find people outside your demographic, who aren't your normal audience, find friends who are readers--not writers, definitely have your writer friends read it as well, and by all means, if a ...
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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...
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We are always on a path of continual growth and I can honestly say I've had my own personal writing breakthrough. It came after reading four different suspense thrillers this weekend. Actually, I should say, re-read. I've not been able to read for pleasure in so long that I went hogwild in the genre of manuscript I'm trying to publish. It was a smart thing to do, because I realized, in comparing my own writing to these authors, who bookish and "telling" my writing can be. Instead gently leadi...
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What a feeling of accomplishment! Since I'm out of state on business for The Job, there is a lot of down time--down time I took full advantage of. Twelve hours of uninterrupted focus, Ulterior Motive is has been refined into a final draft. One more reread, reviews by friends, and it'll be the first I query in 2011.

I was able to focus with lots of coffee and good music (thank you Pandora!).

Because word count was such an issue, I was able to shave UM from 114K to 108K. You might think, holy cr...
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I have always said I write what I would want to read. I love the story about Caitlyn and Paul, the challenge of building believable characters who pop to life from the pages and creating their backstory that makes them relatable. In dumping the prologue, and bouncing ideas off my sounding board, Jill Afzelius, I decided to create a different, more relevant prologue from the point of view of a mysterious stalker.

Gone are the 11 pages that outlined Caitlyn's tumultuous backstory in a dream-lik...

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There comes a time when you're so immersed in a project and you realize you're not getting any further because you're not seeing the whole picture--the end result--that you need to move on. Like a puzzle you're trying to put together. You've been looking for the pieces for so long that all the fragments of the image look the same and your trying to cram pieces in that don't fit. That's how I've been feeling with The Last Scion. After cutting away so much and needing to revise it once more to ...
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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...

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All together I have over a dozen pieces that are either finished or in various states of concept, revision, rewrite, or some other scrutiny. For now, what I have posted are the works I'm most proud of--and what's ready to go right now. I have the bad habit of getting bogged down in over-analyzing my manuscripts. I also have the bad habit of not trusting my abilities to convey what's happening in the thoughts of a character or the design of a scene. I guess you can also attribute it to my lack...
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