You know those passages that make you excited to be a writer. Those descriptions you have to read twice maybe even three times because they are just that good. As a lover of all things horror and dark, I get excited about chilling line and passages. “A kind of nervous restless which haunted me as a fiend.” (Poe M.S Found in…
We writers research…a lot. It’s unavoidable. No matter what you write, you need to look something up. We know you can’t automatically trust anything you read or see on the Internet but you need to vet books as well. How do you determine if a resource is reliable? Date This is more for printed materials but it can be applied…
Sometimes we get so used to seeing things we become immune to it’s magic. Over the weekend, family and friends from DC stayed with me. They wanted a taste of NY Christmas. I’ve been living in Brooklyn, NY for three years and two years before that I’d been attending school in NJ so, I visited…
Writing is our passion. Doesn’t mean we always feel like doing it. I’ve been struggling lately with motivation. The scenes are forming in my head but I don’t write them down anywhere- not even a journal. If you need a good helping of motivation like I do, watch this video. The quote that speaks to…
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…
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…
If you want books on writing I’d recommend memoirs rather than the how-to books. Don’t get me wrong, the how-to books are awesome, I own and still use plenty of them but, I got much more from Stephen King’s On Writing, Joyce Carole Oates’ Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art and Terry Brooks’ Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons…
I’ve discovered I’m not good at writing fight scenes. The last two books I read made my scenes look so unfortunate. “He sheathed Retribution and grabbed the hand holding a blade aimed at his belly and yanked a skinny highlander across the circle to stab his fellow. Reaching around his own back with a knife,…
I’ve read often how important it is for writers to have a blog. I was glad because I enjoy blogging but recently, I came across an article where a writer said it was a wast of time. I started thinking am I spending too much time on something that’ll do nothing to promote my brand and…
