Finally, a place with internet again ( Read more... )

My posts have been scarce lately, as I've been in a bit of limbo with my writing and, more recently, traveling without steady access to a computer. The up side to this is that I am reading a TON ( Read more... )

I keep getting people asking if I'm planning to do NaNo. I've never done it in the past, just because something weird in my brain rebels against the idea of the impetus to write coming from outside myself. I totally love NaNo time, and get behind all my friends who do it, cheer them on, am happy when they get really into it--but I've never felt ( Read more... )

As some of you know, last year I attended an absolutely phenomenal workshop, the Odyssey Writing Workshop up in New Hampshire. I had no idea when I applied just how great it would be, though. In all honesty? I went thinking to myself, “Well, I already know how to write. But this will be great for making connections and learning about the ( Read more... )

See what I did there? Haha.

Anyway. It's no big secret I'm trying to cut my manuscript right now. It needs to drop about 12,000 words to fit within the YA fantasy word limit of 100k. I’m getting a lot of help from other writers who’ve taken a look at my manuscript, especially Amie Kaufman and more recently Kat Zhang. Ultimately, though, I’m ( Read more... )

Yeah, I'm not doing much better than single words, here.

I just got back home and sat down to find my Twitter DM and Gmail inboxes flooded with congratulatory messages, and my sleepy brain (it's past midnight here in Australia) had to really clank and whir a while before I realized what was even going on. As it turns out, my entry in the ( Read more... )

Hey guys! It's been all quiet from me lately, and I apologize for that. Life got hectic for a while, what with WorldCon, followed by the world's biggest wind storm blowing our garden wall down, and all of us having to run around and fix it and figure out what to do with the dog, etc. And then, since we've got company coming Monday, I've been ( Read more... )

The deadline for entries has already passed, but the KidLit gals over at Adventures in Children's Publishing are having a fantastic contest/workshop to help writers polish their pitches. I'm learning an absolute ton just from reading other writers’ pitches and the comments on them. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s ever written a query, is ( Read more... )

I think most writing blogs at some point do a post on inspiration. What inspires you? they ask, and I always love reading the answers. The ones that are similar to my own sources of inspiration make me feel like I'm part of a secret club of creative geniuses, and the ones that are different often introduce me to new methods of inspiration that I ( Read more... )

In no particular order:

1.  If you're writing along, plowing ahead in order to finish a draft, and you think of stuff you want to change later but don't right at that moment because you want to finish, MAKE A NOTE OF IT SOMEWHERE.  You aren't actually going to remember later, no matter how sure you are at the time that you will.

2.  Outline outline ( Read more... )