Things have been a bit sluggish with my WIPs recently. I’d hoped to get my fairy tale revision done by June 15th but things haven’t quite worked out that way. I know which areas need work, but figuring out how to fix them has been a bit daunting. I finally went back to doing some [...]
In a recent post on Children’s Writing and Illustrating, David Caruba shared some of his “State of the Children’s Book Publishing Industry” presentation from this year’s NJ-SCBWI conference. There was lots of great info there, but what really stood out to me was his report on the middle grade market. Middle grade stories remain strong, [...]
Brian Yansky has an interesting post about the importance of writing every day. He states that “getting to the ‘writing place’ where you can pour out words is easier if you open that door every day.” Even a snippet of daily writing time, he says, is better than nothing. When I’m working on something new, [...]
There was a discussion about dialogue on the Blueboards recently: how much to use and how much is too much. Someone chimed in with this bit of advice from Rick Riordan: “Define a character through action, first. Through dialogue and description, second. Through explanation, never. The character should be primarily defined by the choices he [...]
I had another writing date with my friend Alisa yesterday. We’re both deep in the trenches of revision so we spent a lot of time eating cookies and whining (oh, and writing). Our biggest complaint? If you change something in one scene, that means you have to go through a hundred other scenes and change [...]
Now that the semester is over, I’ve run out of excuses for why I’m not getting much writing done. I keep telling myself I’m just taking a teeny-tiny break. Well, break time is over my friends. It’s time to go into attack mode! There are two projects I’ll be tackling: 1. A revision of the [...]
Not only is it nice to commiserate with fellow writers, but often their insights and struggles help me with my own writing. Case in point: as I was reading Brian Yanksy’s blog the other day, something in his post really stuck with me: One thing that my last manuscript taught me is something I had [...]
As I’ve talked about in the past, I have one manuscript that I’ve been working on for years now. It’s an idea that just won’t die, even though I’m not sure how to tell the story properly. A few months ago, I decided to put away the Old One with the intention of coming back [...]
The other day I was asking you, my lovely readers, to tell me what motivates you to keep working on revisions. This got me thinking about how to know when it’s time to take a break from your WIP. Are there are any signs that it’s time to give it a rest? So here they [...]
As I might have mentioned once or twice (or a hundred times) I’ve been in the midst of revisions recently. Overall, it’s been going well, but there have been moments when I’ve started to feel a little burnt out. I’ve stepped away from the WIP as needed to give myself some time to regroup, but [...]
