You’ve just finished writing your first draft! Woo-hoo! Now it’s time to jump in to the revision phase, polish, and make the story shine. NO! Full-stop writer. Cool those jets. Revision is not simply about making sentences tighter or words prettier. That is part of it, but it’s a tiny slice of the whole. So… Read more »
What are Villains in Literature? A villain is, by definition, an evil or immoral character intent on harming others. In literature, these characters portray evil and immoral behavior while also providing readers with an antagonistic force or bad guy – a figure against whom to root. They are often presented as self-serving or selfish, especially… Read more »
During my final year at Pomona College, whenever I had a serious deadline, I would put on my glasses and head to the philosophy library. My glasses were tortoise shell with round lenses and did nothing to help my vision. Seriously, they were filled with fake glass. And the philosophy library might as well have… Read more »
For last year’s NaNoWriMo, I chose to write about my WIP, a modern fantasy YA setting in the Caribbean. I had already finished the novel’s first draft in mid-2022, but something felt off about the writing. I didn’t even want to look at some chapters. It wasn’t disgust: it was detachment. That’s because when you… Read more »
Once you make a habit of writing, there are things you come to expect, like characters ignoring the plot, one revision after another, and long hours spent in front of a computer talking to yourself, often out loud. What you don’t expect, is to discover a secret ingredient that brings your writing to a new… Read more »
When I told a writing instructor I wrote historical fiction, she replied, “Don’t put too much history in it.” I blinked. Say what? How can we have a clue about where we’re going if we don’t know where we’ve been? Historical fiction can take us to the foreign country that is the past, can make… Read more »
Let’s be honest, defining genres can be a real bear, and one of the blurriest lines is the one between Science Fiction and Fantasy. If you’re like me, your manuscript has elements of both. So how do you market it? Cue the glazed eyes and the descent of that nebulous SFF cloud. But what does… Read more »
Ok guys, so full disclosure here, I totally borrowed the term “palate cleanser” from a very gifted writer friend of mine. She’d just finished the final round of edits on her epic Sci-Fi love story, (though she’ll seriously kill me for calling it that). Her female protagonist is a kick-butt, yet deeply complex character, who… Read more »
Many writers claim to have number phobia. They are happy to wrangle with words, but as soon as mentions of math slip into conversation, they bolt, desperate to return to safer terrain. I’m one of the math-loving few in the writing community. I’ve always been a numbers nerd, and I love looking at data in… Read more »
Happy New Year beautiful people on the Internet! I hope 2023 is treating you right and you are ready to finish that novel before the end of this year. Admittedly, I did not have much time to work on my WIP last year. Most of it came out of the frustration I felt every time… Read more »
