Shaking The New Year Up
By Katie Lewis As a young child, I filled notebooks with stories based on my favorite television shows and movies. Digimon, Pokémon, and The Land Before Time. In fourth grade, I wrote a horrifically unscientific murder mystery starring Scully and Mulder of The X-Files for a short story assignment. I was twelve when I began posting my stories online for…
Refresh Your Writing
By Brian Kaufman It’s January. Snow, bitter cold, a false spring for seven days somewhere in the middle, crowded gyms, and empty restaurants. (Of course, who knows what the rest of January holds for us with climate change at the helm.) A time for resolutions.
The Year I Wrote for Myself
By Katie Lewis Looking back at 2022, I’m tempted to be disappointed by how much I wrote (or rather how little). Every year brings new challenges, both to life and in writing. This year had different challenges from last year, so comparing the two is only partially fair. While I may not have produced the…
Tail Spinning through Tale Spinning
By David E. Sharp Gripping the reins of my imagination, I pull them back with a white-knuckle grip, desperate to gain altitude before this whole thing crashes into the dark, cold ocean of dejection and everything goes to pieces. My caffeine gauge hovers over empty. My single operational engine sputters and sparks. How did it…
Writing My Way Through 2022
By Shelley Widhalm In 2020, I was pretty much done with writing, overwhelmed with trying to keep my freelance writing and editing business afloat and supplementing it with a gig grocery store job. Despite my sort of giving up, I still went to conferences and belonged to writing groups like Northern Colorado Writers (see https://northerncoloradowriters.com).…
The Year in Review
By Brian Kaufman Flashback to January 2020: I had two books scheduled for release from two publishers. The first was historical about an old bluesman, and I’d planned a legendary release party. Live music, food, and probable fame. Then COVID made hash out of my marketing plan. Meanwhile, the other publisher postponed my second release…
Down in The Exposition Dumps
By Katie Lewis In 7th grade, my best friend lent me the first Wheel of Time book by Robert Jordan. As a veteran of Tolkien, including The Silmarillion, I was excited to dive into another high-fantasy series. Over a hundred pages in, after a detailed description of the Bel Tine festival and one village’s preparations, there was no…
The Evil Twin
By David E. Sharp Whether you are closing in on your NaNoWriMo word count or plugging away at your magnum opus, those rigorous word counts take a lot of think-juice. You have been diligent, laying one word after another, watching the chapters take shape. Your verbs are immaculate. Your adverbs are scarce. You always attend…
What gets more attention? Description or action?
By Shelley Widhalm If you want to keep readers turning pages, the key is balancing description with action. Readers get bored with too much description, and they get overwhelmed with all action and no breaks. Action in a novel or short story keeps the pace moving at a rapid clip, while description can slow the…
Author Central
By Brian Kaufman The most frustrating part of being a published author has to be marketing. Marketing your books takes two valuable resources (time and money) and offers no guarantees. Worse, for most authors, promotional efforts yield little in the way of results. If you’re not a published author, you might think, Woe is you. I’d…
Loading…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Follow My Blog
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
The Writing Bug 