So the past few months have been ... insane. I quit my job to take another in Chicago. Which is almost three hours away from where I live. Yes, this will necessitate a relocation. We're putting our house on the market in the spring. In the meantime I'll get an apartment. In the mean-meantime, I'm staying with a friend three or four nights a week. I ( Read more... )

What do crocodiles and magnetic paint have in common? Read my post at the SFWA blog to find out!

Back from Gen Con. I met great new people, hung out with cool friends, and walked five hundred miles (that figure is approximate.) I even managed to get some writing done. I think I've finally caught up on sleep. Now I just have to get back into a healthy eating routine and life will be back to normal. Now that Gen Con is past, summer is "over" in ( Read more... )

 If not, you should. If you do, then you already saw this post about finding emotional resonance in technobabble dialogue.

He wrote the post from the standpoint of an actor delivering a scene, but it applies to authors too. Find the emotion in any scene--even an infodumpy one--and you'll make it better. 

Several weeks ago Joe Hill posted several tweets about making stories fun to read. Novels shouldn't be just words with an occasional chapter breaks. Presentation, setting, and mood are all integral to the story.

This got me thinking (as all good tweets do). Stories should you know, be stories with a beginning, middle, and an end. But they also need ( Read more... )

Back in high school and college, I used writing prompts to jump start a story or play with voice. I don't really do that any more ... but I thought it might be fun to see what my awesome writing friends could do with a prompt. Wanna give it a shot? If so, here's your first line:

Where were you last night?

Write a paragraph or a flash fiction piece-- ( Read more... )

I have a deadline of sorts. Well, technically, I have several in the few months (February should be an interesting month at my house), but the one that is looming first and foremost in my mind is December 31st. The first draft of my YA science fiction novel--the ubiquitous WIP, The Daphne Project--needs to be complete. This is not a publisher ( Read more... )

So last weekend found me in OH at lonfiction's place for a writer's retreat. I'd never been to any such retreat before, and so I didn't know what to expect. Don't get me wrong, I'm the sort of girl that never walks into a room full of strangers, but I didn't know how spending the weekend with five people I barely knew--three of whom I knew only from the ( Read more... )

I've hit the first wall in the WIP. I know what happens next, so it's not a "oh my God I just ran out of plot" wall. It's more of a "well, hell, how do I do this" wall. I'm at the "meet cute" portion of my story where the two protags realize the other's existence for the first time and ... well ... it's sort of kicking my butt. I know from past ( Read more... )

We've been working on decluttering the house as of late, and tonight we worked on the the storage area in the basement. We threw out several boxes of crap, including my Clinical Laboratory Science notes from college and a stack of coloring books from my childhood. It was liberating. Still have lots more tossing and organizing to do, but we're ( Read more... )