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…
In a new review for The Renaissance Club, one reader summed up the story: “Time travel and romance, a perfect combination.” I think so too, and it thrills me when someone loves my love story between the Italian genius Bernini and a young art historian who falls through a fold in time. To get a copy and leave your own review, click on THE RENAISSANCE CLUB.
Your novel is about to be published and you just googled ‘Promoting a Novel”. Then you became dizzy and disoriented reading all the articles. Novelists have an especially difficult time weeding through advice on book promotion because most is for nonfiction. Here’s a hint: fiction writers can build on their uniqueness.
Poetry’s wonderful world of magic — that’s almost redundant. Isn’t the elevated world of a poem necessarily a magical one? The magic comes from close attention –the writer’s and the reader’s — to people, beings, relationships, and things. But every poem needs specifics to ground the reader, to help a reader enter the world of the poem.