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January 1 – A Letter to my Teenage Self
Dear Teenage Hyacinth, As a writing prompt for bloganuary, WordPress asked me what advice I’d give you. If I could go back in time and meet you, we could go to a Starbucks and I’d buy a decaf coffee. I know, I know, you’d be mad at me for not buying you “the real thing,”…
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Writing Advice: Break up long sections of dialog, and an accidental story
When I sent Wounded Bride to be edited, the book was full of long sections consisting of nothing but characters talking to each other. In that story, the detectives talk to suspects, and you’d expect there to be lots of dialog, but it should be broken up by actions, sentences about what your characters are…
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Writing Advice: no need to be tense about verbs!
Stories are full of action, so verbs are important, but don’t let that worry you. When I start a story, I have a choice of writing in the past tense, or in the present tense. Both are great, but both have advantages and disadvantages. The choice shouldn’t bog you down. Pick one. You can change…
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Writing: endings and beginnings
With the year 2020 about to become the year 2021, I’m starting to think about finishing up old projects and starting new ones. That goes for all kinds of projects, from cleaning the house to trying new foods, but since this website is mostly about writing, I’d like to talk about the beginning and the…
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NaNoWriMo in 17 days and following my own Writing Advice
If you go to my Fiction page, you can read my NaNoWriMo 2020 novel in seventeen posts. They’re longreads, so you might want to save them or even print them out. Some days, I wrote only one chapter, but there were a few days when I wrote two, or even three chapters. I had originally…
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Writing Advice: dealing with too many ideas
As a Writer, I often find myself in a situation many people might be surprised to hear me complain about: having too many ideas. How can a Writer have too many ideas? Okay, maybe not too many, but too many to write all at once. When I wrote Wounded Bride, I had to deal with…
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Reawakening: the hardest part of writing
In October 2019, I wrote The Hardest Part of Writing. There will be two more posts about writing this week. Tomorrow, is Writing Wednesday, and on Thursday, the writing prompt will be writing itself.
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The Writing Process: The Beginning of Forever
“Forever’s gonna start tonight.” – Bonnie Tyler, Total Eclipse of the Heart Great, now I have that song in my head instead of the words I need for this post. But now that I’m thinking about it, that song could be about the writing process. It really can be quite a roller-coaster. Forever can start…
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Writing Advice – Point of View
Pistol: Why, then the world’s mine oyster. Which I with sword will open. William Shakespeare — The Merry Wives of Windsor, act 2, scene 2 There are no rules about POV. That’s right, there really aren’t any. In this post about Starting NaNoWriMo, I said that I was struggling with third person narration in a…