Teaching a Child to Write — How I Began As as Writer How to teach a child to write? — by early reading. I’m living proof. I gained my desire to write from my mother, who read aloud to me and my brother every day. She also often took us to the library. When I was ten, she took me through a magical literary portal — a fantastic and immense bookstore full of used books,…
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…
Pros & Cons of Small Press Publishing Self-publishing fiction versus small press publishing? Making that choice can be tricky. Most of the articles I’ve encountered weigh the options as “self-publishing versus traditional publishing”. I had experience with small press publishing for my first novel, a time travel Renaissance romance called The Renaissance Club. One thing I learned is that small press publishers are as different from one another as humans are, because most small presses…
Blogs about writing are like my morning newspaper, they get my writer mojo. Each day, I wake up and read stuff on my phone while I’m still in bed, and into the coffee phase of waking up. I have a writing practice of using the first two hours of the day for my creative self — drafting new chapters, poems, story ideas, and editing works in progress. To get into the swim, I read about…
It’s my motto for surviving as a writer and a creative — Onward & Ice Cream! Plus, persistence and writing community. Three essentials for writer survival. One of my writer pals was even nice enough to create this graphic for me. This is my banner as I ride into battle with the hope of conquest in finding a publisher or agent to champion my writing and the many stories I’m planning.
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.
I recently discovered a new author who has given me many exciting reading adventures and has also become a role model for me as an author. Gigi Pandian is a writer who decided to go her own way and play outside the box, only to find the box was following her.
Books with Magic for Delightful Summer Reading Three books with magic to uplift your summer reading, to inspire hope and lift you into a world of new possibilities. Books of fun, magic, and humanity. Summer is a magical time, and reading is one of its great pleasure. With my magic wand, I’m conjuring three novels to lift your summer reading onto a magic carpet. What makes us crave magic in stories? We want to be…
One of the challenges I’m facing is marketing a romance novel that’s non-traditional — that is, doesn’t follow the romance formula. My book The Renaissance Club didn’t start out as a classic romance story formula. I was simply intrigued by the idea of a love story across the ages. As I imagined my heroine, May Gold, I wasn’t thinking about book marketing categories, Amazon, the Big Five, romances, or literary agents.
Today, I find myself in writer-bliss — thrilled to be writing a new novel. There’s the phase of editing a book (tough fun) and the phase of marketing it (tough and not so fun), and the best phase, starting one. It’s summer, and ideas are blooming in my head as wildly as the roses I tend in 12 pots are putting out buds and opening red, pink, gold, and white. New story ideas opened up…