By Elvira Stoltey and Ghoulie Luek This time of year brings out ghosts, goblins, and spooky apparitions. Of course we writers, often the creators of such paranormal specters, stare down spooks and fanged creatures knowing they are but a backspace stroke away from their demise. While we may show bravado with the monstrous muses of…
Category: Blog
In The Aftermath of Colorado Gold
By Yvonne Montgomery One of the sessions I appreciated the most at this year’s Colorado Gold Conference was Christine Jorgensen’s Plotting Your Novel Using a Dynamic Grid. My study has always been a forest of papers where the filing system is similar to an anthropological dig: one layer on top of another. The goal…
The Blank Spaces In Our Stories: The Messages Writers Send Readers Between the Words
By Kym-n-Mark Todd As writers, we all spend lots of time thinking about narrative craft – plot, character, setting, dialog – but what about the blank spaces between all those words? Readers don’t give much thought to those spaces – unless they’re missing. So it’s up to writers to fill the blanks with implied…
Wrapping it Up—Finishing Up a Series
by Katriena Knights No matter how much you love a series, sooner or later it has to end. Well, this is true for television—in series fiction, you could probably keep going until you expire in front of your keyboard. However, there are plenty of reasons you might want to wrap up a book series, and…
Talk to the Paw: Halloween Choices!
by Karen Duvall Halloween is creeping up on me. I haven’t done a very good job preparing for it this year, mostly because I’m staring down the barrel of a deadline. What do you know, I have to have this book turned in by October 31. What a coincidence that it’s the same day as…