The most important message you need to carry with you is this: You are a writer That’s the first step. You know that you have a story or a message that burns within you, that needs to be released. Most importantly, you know that words are your medium. But what if you don’t? What if…
My Story: Editing a Bad Page
You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page. — Jodi Picoult The Middle Build What I didn’t know about my badly written page was that it was turning into a chapter, and actually leading to the middle build of the novel of my 20’s. When I was 27, I found…
2020 Women in Publishing Summit
I wanted to take a moment to share an upcoming event. The first week of March, the 3-8th, will be the Women in Publishing Summit, which is an online collection of daily presentations. This is a FREE summit (though you can pay and upgrade) providing webinars and talks from authors, agents, publishers and marketers. Once…
What's Stopping You From Starting to Write?
As writers, we face regular obstacles: coming up with a plot, coming up with characters, remembering how to do the words, and life. Life is a big one, too. It always seems to get in the way of our writing time. That doesn’t mean that life is a drag. Not one bit. Life can be…
March Book Club Book Anouncement
Sunday I announced the launch of the Writing Book Club, in which, each month, we discuss and go over a writing-related book. The book for March is The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield About The War of Art The War of Art is a…
A Monthly Writing Book Club
Reading Books Reading is an important part of writing. There’s no getting around it. Whether it’s for enjoyment, to learn about marketing or your topic, or to learn about your genre, reading is important. One of the greatest things you can learn from reading, regardless of your reasoning, is structure. Reading is like learning a…
December 17 Journal Prompt: Your Own Personal Mary Sue
Who Is Your Perfect Person? We’re going to play around a little bit with character traits here. I want you to think about your ideal person, and think about what makes them perfect. Thinking about a perfect person might sound count productive. After all, wouldn’t that essentially be creating a Mary Sue? For those of…
December 16 Journal Prompt: Inspirational Flaw
What Flaws Does Your Inspirational Person Have? In a continuation of our look at how to develop a character, and thus how to generate writing prompts, we will build off the journal prompt from yesterday. Now that you’ve taken the time to learn and write a little bit about the person who inspires you in…
December 15 Journal Prompt: Who's Awesome?
The first part of the month was focusing on getting to know yourself. The last part of the month was getting ready by setting some goals. Now we’re going to look at how to generate ideas for writing. Today is going to consider things in your own life that might work toward building your characters….
December 14 Journal Prompt: Know Your Steps
What steps are you going to take toward achieving these goals? You now have at least some of your goals for the upcoming New Year, with all the steps we’ve taken. You have done some work regarding your fears and how those might influence your success and your goals. Now we’re going to look at…
December 13 Journal Prompt: Know Your Fears
What Is Your Fear Around Writing? There are two more posts specifically about goal setting, and one of them I’d like to talk to you a little bit about fear. When you boil it down, fear is behind what stops us. We’re afraid of investing, we’re afraid of success, we’re afraid of failure. We’re afraid…
December 12 Journal Prompt: What to Write Next Year
What is your writing goal for the whole of 2020? We’ve spent some time delving into the habits we can create to make our year successful, but now I’m going to switch gears a little bit. Knowing what you now know about yourself, we are going to look at what goals you can set for…
