Parents in children’s and young adult books are inconvenient. If they’re too involved in their children’s lives then it often limits what can happen in the story. In past projects I’ve worked on the parents have been missing or kidnapped or deceased. But now I have two new projects in which there’s at least one [...]
This part of the month is when NaNo gets really hard. Because of Thanksgiving, there are even more distractions from writing than usual. So, not surprisingly, I’m behind in my word count. But I know I can catch up. Last night I asked my husband to try to guilt me into writing 3,000 words, and [...]
My husband’s family is full of creative optimists; they plunge into new ideas and try to make them work. It doesn’t always lead to success, but you can’t accuse them of not trying. When my husband gets an idea, usually for a techy thing, he often has to teach himself a new programming language in [...]
I have a confession. I’m a long-time sufferer of the Lazies. You must know the Lazies. When you should be writing, but you check your email instead, or watch TV, or organize your socks, or stare at a wall. It’s not that you’re a lazy person. It’s not that you don’t want to write. It’s [...]
Every year the Erin Murphy Literary Agency has a writing retreat for its clients. I wasn’t able to attend last year, but I’m taking the plunge and heading off to Austin, TX in April for this year’s retreat. I’m looking forward to a long weekend of meeting fellow writers, talking shop, and making friends. I’ve [...]
I’m sure you’ve heard me mention my new side project First Page Panda (we’re having our second book giveaway tomorrow!) which has been a fun little idea to work on. Starting up the site has made me think a lot about when I first started blogging, when it felt like I was writing into the [...]
The wonderful Tara Lazar was nice enough to let me do a guest post today on embracing your weirdness as part of PiBoIdMo (Picture Book Idea Month). I felt sort of like an impostor writing a post aimed at picture book writers since I don’t write picture books myself. Well, not usually. As I talk [...]
The second week of NaNoWriMo really is the hardest. In the first week you’re still running on the story ideas you had when you started the project. But by the second week, all those ideas are gone and you start thinking: “What is the point of this, anyway?” On Monday, I really hit a wall [...]
It’s time for another installment of the Letter to Myself series in which authors write letters to their younger writers selves, giving advice, encouragement, or words of warning. Today’s letter comes from my agent-mate Jennifer Nielsen whose debut novel was just released last month. Okay younger Jen, let’s deal with the practical issues first. One, [...]
Normally when I’m working on a story I go through it chronologically, going back to tweak things, but still moving forward. Essentially, I write it from start to finish. But with my NaNoWriMo project this year, I’ve found myself skipping around quite a bit, writing snippets of scenes that will come later in the story. [...]
