Adverbs are not your Friends…Seriously

I love words. If I didn’t, it would make spending all of my time in front of a computer screen or notebook more than a little boring. However, some of us love certain words too much and overuse them. I’m guilty of this crime. I have pet words and bad habits. But being aware of […]

Stuck? Try Bored.

I think T. S. Eliot got it right when he wrote, “April is the cruelest month.” It certainly hasn’t been particularly kind to me, and it’s been busy to boot. I cannot wait for May, if only for the clean slate of the new month will bring. I had high hopes for my writing in […]

Give me Something to Sing About

Around this time last year, I went to a marvelous workshop for kidlit writers, the Big Sur Writing Workshop. It was pretty awesome and pretty daunting, and I learned a lot about myself and critiquing. One of those things I learned about, is the subject of today: writing stakes. During the workshop, the most common piece […]

What’s Genre Got to Do with It?

I write what’s considered “genre” fiction. Genres are many and varied, from mysteries to fantasy to romance to westerners. Typically, genre fiction is anything that isn’t “literary” fiction or considered mainstream. It’s arbitrary and the bane of writers in the process of querying, especially when some genre writers (like Stephen King) are considered mainstream. How […]

So You Want to Write a Novel

Congratulations! You want to write a novel. According to Google, so does everybody else, or at least several hundred of million. Sadly, most people won’t, or at least they won’t write something that they finish. If you tell a perfect stranger you’re working on a novel, doesn’t it always seem like the stranger is too? […]