THE COVER TO MY NEW BOOK IS HERE! I was lucky to get great feedback on mockups when I was playing around with concepts and images. This couple is the best one for my story of Lara, the young spiritual seeker and her boyfriend Daniel, musician and Lara’s protector as they tour India following Lara’s Map to Enlightenment. In this road trip romance, they’re both trying to figure out their goals in life and how…
Ideas for new novels seem to fall into my mind at the worst moments. In the middle of a meeting or phone call, falling asleep, watching television with my husband. He doesn’t love it when I suddenly stop paying attention to our murder mystery show and begin typing.
Promoting your book should be fun and easy — are you crazy? When there are millions of books out there competing for attention, getting your published book to shine in a spotlight that readers can find seems at first like finding a gold ring that’s been thrown into the ocean. If you’re a new author and waiting for your book to launch, or it has just launched and you’re obsessing over not doing enough, you…
The most wonderful thing has happened, the thing I always wanted, and I’m in here under the covers hiding from the book launch day for my first novel, The Renaissance Club. It was published on January 23 by Fiery Seas Publishing, a wonderful new publishing company. Your book launch may not be as scary as mine, but probably it will be. You might find yourself hiding like I am because after all the effort to write…
I’m beginning a new DIY writing retreat! Heading down a new path of revising my draft of Novel #2 – better known as The Romantics, a story of two half-sisters and the cottage they inherit in Italy, along with its resident ghost. It was drafted last year during National Novel Writing Month, (NaNoWriMo) a month-long writing marathon in which you commit to write 50,000 words of a new book. Are you jumping into this national…
Ways to Plot a Novel Working on a plot outline so you can plunge into your next big creative project, or getting ready to jump into National Novel Writing Month — could you use at least 10 ways to plot a novel? I have a list of articles for you. Actually, it’s a lot more than 10 ways. Writers in the Storm has an excellent article on different ways to plot your story. From a…
Here I am on a weeklong stay-at-home, self-designed week of working on my new novel — my DIY writing retreat — and I’m thinking, “What do you do on a writing retreat during breaks? You talk to other writers!” So here I am, kibbitzing with you, fellow writer. I hope you’ve had an hour or more of writing today — possibly you’re even on your own DIY writing retreat — and that it’s going well.…
I’ve decided to launch from my Rocket Kid Writing blog into a newly titled blog, which will be integrated with my new website (stay tuned!) as The Writing Path. It’s not an easy path, involves some hard pulling at times, some days of feeling lost in the woods, but for me, it’s a compelling path of self-discovery. I have to keep going forward. And though it often feels solitary, I’m surrounded by writer friends, whether…
One obvious way to find good writing podcasts is to go to the major magazines and papers. They all have writing and reading related podcasts. But I want to hear from people like me, novelists in the trenches of a first or second book, writers suffering through querying, plotting, character development, point-of-view decisions. Authors working to publicize their indie books or books out from smaller book publishers. I want to know how they’re doing it,…
By Writing Holiday, I of course mean Writing ON a Holiday. Holidays are better known as Writer’s Retreats, for all writers truly addicted to their art seize on the first amount of free time to face the blank page. Or the written page that desperately needs revising. Novel writing occurs over an extended period of a year or more. Long form story writing requires you to visit your work as often as possible — that’s…