I now understand the statement there aren’t enough hours in the day. My day-to-day is supposed to be writing my second novel, editing my first, world building, research, helping my mother with her business, establishing my business, building my author platform. Then, add to all that, a full-time job. Fun. Actually, it really is fun. The headache…
Character physical descriptions. How much information do you give? Or rather, how much information do you need to give? Once again, there are no set-in-stone rules on how you handle this. From reading romance novels, I’ve gathered the author is expected to give a thorough description of how the characters look. On the other hand, we have…
Reading King of Thorns got me thinking about backstory. Like most aspects of writing, there are no hard and fast rules to backstory. How you handle it has more to do with your personal preferences. For those who don’t know, backstory is any information about a character’s past. It’s the things that happened before the events in…
Ever read book you didn’t want to finish because it’s that good; a book where you can’t help but break out the highlighter? I loved King of Thorns. Another amazing cover by the way. This is the second book in Mark Lawrence’s The Broken Empire series. The first was Prince of Thorns. The story centers around one major event…
There comes a time in every story’s life when it’s been polished so often it’s luminescent. When that time comes, we authors need to stop. There is such a thing as too much editing. I have a feeling no matter how many times we tweak our story, we will always find something wrong with it. It’s…
My beta readers gave me some great comments. Since I have a better understanding of where my series is going, I’m editing my first novel differently this time around. If I come across a pivotal scene, I make a note of it as reference for the series. This book brought up a lot of questions. I’m writing them down…
It was about what I expected. That’s a great way to start a review. I was hoping this one would be better than the forth one, Afterlife, but it was about the same. A fun ride. If you really like the video game, though, I’d recommend skipping this one. I don’t know the original story but was…
I’ve said it before- I don’t like the idea of writing for the market. You should write your story the way you want to. That being said, we can still get caught up in what people might think. My novel has a few graphic scenes. I didn’t think they were that intense but my beta…
I’ve said it before, I love morally questionable characters. You know, the antihero. I enjoy writing them. How do you make these little monsters sympathetic without filing down their claws? My characters kill with no remorse. They’re prone to violence and can be more than a little heartless. They treat humans like slightly useful ants. There’s no deep reason they act…
You’d think with the awesomeness that is Google we could do all the research for our books online. Yeah, I thought that too and was way off. In a novel I wrote, I gave my protagonist a gun not thinking much about it. On the re-read, I realized I knew absolutely nothing about guns but made the weapon an important fixture…
