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Self-publishing Your NaNoWriMo Book

Self-publishing your NaNoWriMo book may be easier than you think — and take a lot longer than you expect. The above novels took me an average of one year to draft and another year to edit and polish, develop cover art and marketing materials, and launch. They each required an investment of money and time, and of the two, time was the more expensive investement — well beyond the month of November.

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Best Time Travel Fiction and Finding Love

Finding Love in a Past Era A lot of contemporary time travel fiction involves finding love. And it magically happens. On paper, one can simply step through a fold in time’s curtain or penetrate a magical standing stone and voila! meet your soulmate in a past time. This is magical realism time travel — it just happens. But think about it:  love across the centuries  has a lot of messy aspects. First, the customs of…

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In the Querying Trenches? Courage — It’s a Marathon

Are you in the querying trenches — querying agents with a fiction manuscript? That’s probably one of the hardest phases of the writing life. Being on submission is hard too (when your agent is sending out your manuscript to editors) but somehow querying agents feels to me harder. Here are some survival strategies.

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Happy 2018! New Year’s Writing Goals

Happy 2018! What are your new year’s writing goals? Someone in one of my writers groups asked me, while wishing me a happy 2018. I was shocked to realize I don’t have many. My debut novel launches on January 23 — The Renaissance Club, my time-travel love story, available now on Amazon for pre-order. I have a poetry collection coming out in August — Arabesque, from FutureCycle Press. And I’m finishing the last revision before…

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Illustrated Preview of my novel The Renaissance Club, and countdown to launch!

It’s starting to feel like the countdown to the offical launch of my novel, The Renaissance Club, in January! As the daughter of a rocket scientist, I have to use rocket metaphors in connection with the word “launch”. Very soon you’ll be able to pre-order my book on Amazon. And also soon, I’ll host a giveaway. My giveaway will include another good read, signed paperback copies of my book of poems and essays, Gods of…

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Preparing for National Novel Writing Month

I never thought I’d be writing about preparing for National Novel Writing Month, but November 2016 changed my perspective on what I had considered a ridiculous rush to write a novel in one month. How could any self-respecting author write so fast, so carelessly, so focused on the wrong dimension — the sheer number of words? And then I tried it. I was in grief over losing someone close to me. I couldn’t work, I…

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Evolution of a Cover Design

The evolution of a cover design for my novel The Renaissance Club has been a fascinating process. I’m thrilled with this cover art, showing my main character walking into a mysterious, dreamlike Italian Renaissance landscape. The scene shimmers with possibility, like the doorway in time through which she walks to meet her 17th century artist hero, sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini. Evolution of a Cover Design The process of working with my publisher on cover art began…

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Why Writers Wait So Much

For the decades that I’ve been writing, I’ve often wondered why writers wait so much. We wait for inspiration, we wait for writing time, and excruciatingly, we wait for responses from publishers and agents. Sometimes I’ve waited months for a reply to an agent query or a literary journal. Is it just me and my writing? What makes them hesitate and delay? Or is the publishing industry so clogged with writers pitching their writing that…

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DIY Writing Retreat – My 7 Days of Total Focus on a New Novel

Hooray for finishing my DIY writing retreat! Balloons rising into the air!! I’m celebrating that I now have a full draft of Novel #2 – better known as The Romantics. After nearly full week of making this new book my primary focus, every morning, noon, and night, I met my goal. How I Did It The goal was to give myself a week of StayWriCation (see earlier post) and finish a first full draft of…

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Magical Realism in Women’s Fiction

Magical realism in women’s fiction gives the reader and writer a broader canvas of possibilities. When you’re reading about women and their relationships (the broad definition of women’s fiction), elements of magic provide visual ways to describe a character’s feelings, frame internal events, and create adventures. Magical realism in women’s fiction can be small touches or big events, such as time travel. I used two magical realism elements in my novel The Renaissance Club ,…

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