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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What's on Pandora: Adiemus, Dawn Dancing| Adiemus III: Dances of Time

What's on the Nightstand: JosephCampbell|Hero with a Thousand Faces

Save the Words Word of the Day: Locupletative (adj) tending to enrich

Amongst the many suggestions to, I finally picked up JosephCampbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. Friends, peers and colleagues suggested I do so after they had started reading the atrociously long and complicated rough draft that is The Last Scion, the first Shadows Saga book. While TLS has...
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As I writer, it's cringe-worthy when such dubious buzzwords are inducted into the dictionaries like McJob and soul patch while other words, albeit archaic, whither away into extinction such as tudiculate, which means to pound or bruise. Now see, tudiculate is a descriptive word with a purpose! The working breed of vocabulary. What we have now our ridiculous words that seem to be hallmarks of are hallmarks of a pop-culture saturated society. 

But there is one word that I've come to love and hat...
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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...

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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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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...
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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 ...
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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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Hijacked, Shanghaied, blind-sided, utterly off-track.

I'm in the midst of editing Ulterior Motive when out of NOWHERE a story hits me. A political thriller! A place of turmoil, two governments who deny any involvement in the assassination of a deputy foreign minister, and an American foreign affairs diplomat is thrown into the middle of it and suddenly finds herself the scapegoat. Hunted as an assassin, an unlikely ally comes to her aid, only to find himself shut out by his special forces team...
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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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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...

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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 am so into this edit and revision of Ulterior Motive it's all I've been able to think about. Along with the need to slash some serious word count down, I'm also trying to subjectively look at the plot. Finding and answering loopholes, addressing character depth, evaluating tonality, and cutting verbose passages.

I'm half-way through the edit/revision and have killed about 2500 words. I need to kill about 10K more. I see where there is opportunity to do so, which is a good thing. I always wo...
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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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As I reread, revise and edit The Last Scion, the ground-laying novel and world builder for the Darkling series, I have found 27 unnecessary passages. From infancy through 6000 years of Ahmavia's and the Darkling's birth, culture and life--lots of things happened historically. I wanted to embed the Darklings into stone history was written with, and while some of it I'll keep in a summary form, I see it's too much to bog the reader down. In essence, it's not essential to the story, the furtheri...
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I learn something new about the writing industry, the craft itself or about myself almost every day. From the business aspect, to learning the wisdom of others in the process, feedback on manuscripts (and, because I'm not an English Major--all kinds of grammar and structure goodies), to my own limitations and abilities to help me grow. Using social networking like Twitter has helped me connect with others like me, those whose successes I can't wait to realize, and industry professionals who g...

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And what it takes to freelance

At one of those all-important writer's conferences, a keynote speaker mentioned the importance of building a forum for oneself. To create a foundation in the industry--such as writing articles, becoming a contributing writer for subject magazines (online or printed media)--something to begin building readership and a base for credentials. When I asked about blogging, I think I got the stink eye from more than one industry expert in there. Not that there's anythin...
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There is an author I communicated with early on in her career (of whom will remain nameless as I don't want to name drop) when she was a debut author. She writes in a genre I love to read, but don't write for. I asked her advice about how long it took her to get to where she was, what to expect, and what should I do to better my chances of being published. We'll call her Ms. H.

First, I know and understand (as should anyone entering in this business) that you don't write thinking you're going ...
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As the technology age increases and changes the way this publishing nonsense is done nowadays, so is the way one must market oneself. Gone are the days where a writer could be an eccentric recluse like Salinger, and here we are in the days of instant gratification and overexposure. If you're not screaming about your brand and creating a niche in this crowded world you're going to be that faded wallflower. I had an author site once befor with regular traffic of roughly 50 - 75 hits a month of ...

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