There was a time when I would have argued titles don’t sell books. I would have been wrong. Now there is good reason behind my previous thinking. More often than not I don’t remember the actual title to the last book I read. I remember characters or plot or author,...
A friend of mine, Intrigue author Ann Voss Peterson, has a mantra concerning books and the main characters’ goals and motivations. It needs to be personal and it needs to be important, very important at least to the character—to the world is even better. (but that...
This may seem like a strange question, but it is one I encounter a lot. Maybe not in the actual question form, but from people who think they know the answer and oh so obviously don't. In fact, even writers who say they write romance don't always know what makes a...
Last weekend I was on a panel at OddCon titled People and Animals. It's a pretty wide topic and the conversation varied a lot, but one thing that came up (Okay, I think I brought it up...) were tricksters. I love tricksters. For those of you who aren't familiar with...
Galleys for Amazon Ink arrived yesterday; corrections are due back to Pocket by Monday--which means I'm busy groaning and dreading. :) I posted a tongue in cheek note about this on Facebook and a number of people replied with congrats. Got me thinking maybe people...
As a writer I think we "know" a lot of things, and probably do many instinctively (automatically following story structure because we have read so much, etc.), but that is different from really "getting" something. For some reason, I recently had an epiphany about...
Has to be editing. I don't mean revising where you figure out what is wrong and how to fix it--that can be fun. No, I mean taking someone else's comments--frequently just noting repeated words, or missed commas--and trolling through your manuscript to fix them....
Have you all read or seen The Devil Wears Prada? I just finished the movie last night--well kind of, the disc was cracked and stopped RIGHT at the end (but that's another story). Anyway, how great was Miranda? I mean really--did you love her or hate her or both?...
I am in the process of reading Scene and Structure by Jack Bickham. I really recommend it, if you haven't read it yet. It takes a lot of information from Swain's book and makes them much easier (at least for me) to digest. Anyway, Bickham talks a lot about the story...
