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...
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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 ...
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Would you believe I was caught in another brain storm for yet another story idea? Well, I was. Proving this has been one hell of a lightening rod of ADD resulting in creativity. Someone must have given the muse some coffee. I'm not complaining. The only thing I'm complaining about is that along with the Day Job keeping me well occupied during the day, my side business venture (a hobby of mine--gasp! One that doesn't involve writing!) is taking off and taking up most of my other spare time. 

Wr...
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Love that word, maelstrom. The Scandinavian word maelström was introduced into English by Edgar Allen Poe, and anyone who knows my love for things dark and on the outskirts of mainstream, Poe has got to be a favorite of mine. But maelstrom is defined as a powerful whirlpool. And that's what my muse has been dragging me through as new story ideas and plot enhancements to WIPs have been taking me by storm. 

I have yet another story that has yanked my attention away from Tree of Life. It's a fan...
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And when I say "muse", I mean me. I was in the middle of story editing and doing further research for Tree of Life when an idea struck me. 

I've been playing around with an idea about cult deprogramming for a while and the plot smacked me so hard and out of the blue that I had to stop what I was doing and get an outline started for it. After a few hours of cursory research on the subject I developed characters and story line. What if a deprogrammer realizes who he's attempting to debrief is tr...
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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...
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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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