When things are at their worst, Make them laugh

It's certainly a decision of style to add humor to a serious story. Many many authors do not. I, personally, find those books harder to read. Probably because I'm the kind of person who tells fart jokes after a funeral.

Why did you do that?

every time a character does anything you, as a writer need to ask them why. And they need to be able to tell you.

Judging a book by it’s cover

While I still am cleaning up my YA Fantasy before it goes out to friends and family for a read, there are other more fun things to do too. Like Design a Cover! I've worked as a graphic artist since graduating college so I know the value of an attractive cover and even more important,...

The YA Paranormal Fantasy Formula

This weekend I downloaded a couple indie YA fantasy novels onto my kindle and read them. I enjoyed them. They were well written and kept me interested to the end, where they wrapped up alot of elements but left the reader with a teaser to get them to buy the next in the series. Here's...

Don’t take my back story!

I have a problem. I love to examine motivation. I love to determine just what happened in a persons life to bring them to where they are now. I'm pretty sure it drives my husband crazy and I missed my calling as a psychiatrist. This quality of mine is the most apparent, however, in my...

Writers write, better writers edit too

When I wrote my first full length novel I felt like I had conquered the world. I suppose, in a way I had conquered a world. The world of Lila Jepodia, a warrior elf princess who defeated an evil tyrannical shadow master (that would have had Tolkien's estate calling their lawyers). I loved my character....

Finished the book!

I just finished writing "The Silent Apocalypse". Here's the last line: "Liam did not mind. He supposed that they would meet again." Chills, right? So I'm all ready to start submitting to every agent and publisher in the Eastern United States, right? (insert laughing gif here) Yeah. While I'm chomping at the bit to get...

Writing Mom

There are glorious moments when you are writing that the world falls away. Stress and worries and everything around you vanishes as your fingers fly over the keyboard and the words pour out, perfect and poignant and exactly like they should be. These are the moments writers write for. The times it seems we are...

Lump of Clay

The nature of writing is not beauty, it is not creation, and it is not wisdom. It is compulsion. It is the pressing need to release something that has been thumping around in your head. For a painter it can be no more than a color scheme, a composer might have to hear what a...