As we hit the middle of NaNoWriMo, many of you are shooting for your 1,667 – 2,000 words per day and trying to meet your deadlines. Fear of falling behind and the constant, looming sense that you aren’t writing fast enough dogs many writers at this point in the process, and I want to step...Read More

One of the things that I realized was never taught in any of my creative writing courses in college or even discussed a lot in most of the writing groups I’ve been in is exactly what it’s like to work with a professional editor. So, since I have been on both sides of that experience,...Read More

Writers are typically categorized into two camps: plotting and pantsing. And never the twain shall meet. These two categories have been around as long as I’ve been in the industry (over fifteen years now), and they’re talked about in countless books about writing and publishing as the two primary methods used to craft a book....Read More

As I write this in early July, there’s something going on, on TikTok which, you may or may not know, is my primary marketing platform. I have between 1,500 and 1,600 followers as I write this, and the number is slowly growing and reflects a lot of hard work and time I’ve put in over...Read More

This is part one of a three-part series I’m doing over the next three weeks where I talk about book taglines, book blurbs, and marketing hooks for authors. I know marketing is about as exciting as watching paint dry for a lot of authors–either that or they feel like it’s going to bite them–but I...Read More

I am slowly starting to get back into the swing of things after my surgery and am finally beginning to have enough brain that I can think. Since I’m doing a talk on this subject for my Discord writing group this week, I figured I’d revisit the Beat Sheet and story structure. I’ve done several...Read More

Author voice is a concept that is far too often mistaken for other things, so I want to start by defining what voice isn’t. I start there because the majority of times I’ve ever dealt with an issue regarding author voice are situations where an author develops a mistaken idea of what their voice includes....Read More

The last few weeks I’ve been spending many, many hours a day in study of the part of writing few authors enjoy and most dislike: marketing. I took the free Amazon Ads Course by the excellent Bryan Cohen, attended his seminar on newsletter marketing a few days ago, and I spent hours and hours fine-tuning...Read More

When we start writing, we often start with a grand idea. A plan. An aspiration. When I was in high school writing my first “novel” (it was 40 pages in Word), I wanted to write this epic romance novel. I named it “Chapter One” and had this female author get sucked into the world of...Read More

I’m working on a class about this, so that’s forthcoming, but I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about and discussing what, exactly, this means. It is, in my opinion, vitally important (as you might have guessed by the fact that I’m creating a class about it). So what, exactly, do I mean...Read More