Happy Thursday, squiders. I hope yours find you better than mine, where I am literally a fountain of snot. (Tips for dealing with sinus congestion–and hopefully getting rid of it? I will love you forever.) Anyway, Siri and I spent
Why Go Looking for Writing Ideas?
First of all, squiders, I apologize for disappearing off the grid. Normally when I go out of town I pre-write and schedule the posts, but we took a spontaneous trip last week and I didn’t have time to get things
Remembering Theme When Lost
Good afternoon, Squiders! We’ll start our next nonfic topic about coming up with ideas and expanding them into something workable next week. I still need to finish outlining the topic before we get started. But, while we’re talking about that,
PPWC Session Wrap-up, Part 1
Good morning, Squiders. I’m back from PPWC, and now that I’ve gotten some sleep, I am vaguely functional again. I’ve gone to PPWC before, and I’ve done conference write-ups after the fact for all of them, so I thought I’d
Character Change as a Catalyst for Conflict
A few weeks ago, my sister finally convinced me to join Pottermore and get sorted into a house. Now, I was 14 when I started reading the Harry Potter books, and over the years I have taken a lot of sorting quizzes.
Depth of Setting
Well, Squiders, I’ve talked about Holly Lisle’s revision class before and how helpful I have found it when putting together my own revision process. I still reference the class often, even though I’m working on my fourth revision since I
Don’t Skimp on Your Setting
So, I got an email this morning from a semi-local school about doing an author talk to their kids in November, and it first it was like, Hey! Cool! Someone thinks I’m neat! But now that I’ve looked at it
Have We Gone Too Far?
Have you ever had a scene that is in such bad shape that it just makes you want to flail incoherently? Yeah, me too. But, in other news (I totally wrote “noises,” which I credit to my in-laws watching a
What They Really Mean When They Say ‘Write What You Know’
I was working on an interview for our upcoming long-term blog tour for City of Hope and Ruin, and one of the questions was about the worst writing advice I’d ever received. So I was thinking back over writing advice
What is Conflict?
We talked about conflict on Tuesday at Storycraft, and I put together an info sheet on the topic, which I thought you guys might like to see. It’s pretty basic–conflict is a wide and varied monstrosity, and you could really