When you've got nothing to lose

Visit me at The Unpublished Writers' Guide to Survival and find out why I had nothing to lose.

Three day writing marathon

Day 1 of my mini-ri-mo.

542 words before my first interruption. There HAS to be a better way to get words on the page. Why is it when I'm trying to write suddenly everyone needs my attention and has issues that only I can solve?

Updated to add total for day one: 2360 words - a full day of interruptions

A question of interviews

Today I'm over at Killer Chicks talking about using character interviews. I could use some good suggestions for interviewing characters. Come on over and tell me what you ask your characters to get to know them.

Happy Holidays!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

I've been busy working on books in the Spring River Valley series and tweaking the blog/website. For now I don't plan to have two sites, only because website tinkering takes way too much time and I'm not good at it. Once the series goes live, updates will be posted here and my Spring River Valley Page will contain buy links.

The official release of JILTED IN JANUARY is coming up fast! I can't believe a year has gone by since I began working on this series.

Stay tuned for more information [and very possibly a chance to start the series before it's official release date].

Where did September go?

It seems like it was September just a minute ago. I don't know where the time went. I wish I could say I was so busy writing I didn't notice, but I was acutally doing a lot of goofing off. While usually the cold weather energizes me and makes me want to get work done, this year it had the opposite effect. I spent a lot of time just hanging around and feeling bad for not working so hard, but I realize I probably needed the break.

I've written over 200,000 words so far this year - and while I should be dancing for joy at getting so much done, all I saw was how much still wasn't finished.

I'm a little less neurotic now - just a little less and hopefully over the next month or so I'll be completely back on track.

Stay tuned and thanks for sticking with me!

Happy September!

It's been a while, I know...I've been busy writing, writing, writing.

Now that the summer is over and we're back to some kind routine, I'm a little more focused and raring to get even more accomplished. The cooler weather energizes me so hopefully I'll be blogging more, tweeting more and gearing up for my first release in January. Stay tuned for a cover reveal - coming soon!

Scene history 101

Here's a day in the life of a scene in my WIP - or maybe more like a week in the life:

1. Wrote the scene.
2. Got stuck on following scene
3. Went back and read the scene.
4. Hated the scene.
5. Edited the scene.
6. Read it again, still hated it.
7. Copied and pasted the scene into a document called "DELETED SCENES".
8. Deleted scene from draft.
9. Started new scene.
10. Got one sentence written.
11. Gave up on scene, took afternoon off.
12. Reread scene from DELETED SCENES.
13. Decided it really wasn't so bad.
14. Copied and pasted scene back into draft.
15. Went on and wrote following scene.

The mire

I'm mired in my current novella at the moment. Stuck in the middle, not moving forward. I know where I want to go and how I want to end up - but I've come to a spot that needs a bridge and I'm not sure how to build the bridge.

With another three-day weekend coming up, maybe I'll have some uninterrupted time to work this problem out.

What do you do when you're stuck in the middle?

Do you ever wonder...

If the situations you create in your stories will seem too far-fetched for readers? The funny thing is, the weirdest things I've written are based on real happenings. They say truth is stranger than fiction, but do readers really believe that?

Monday night blues

I hate it when my favorite Monday night shows are repeats.

I'm a big fan of How I Met Your Mother, Two Broke Girls and Mike and Molly. [You can keep Two and a Half Men, thanks - not much improved with Ashton Kutcher, sorry to say].

Since there's nothing to watch between 8:00 and 10:00, I'm up in my office writing - well, so far I've tweeted and posted to my blogs. My WIP is open and ready to go and I'm procrastinating because...if I don't get my procrastinating out of the way, I can't concentrate. LOL.

Okay, I'm really going to write now.

It's already March...

...in my world. I'm currently working on the ROUGH ROUGH draft of the third novella in my series and it's March for my characters. I have to keep reminding myself it's still only January in the real world.

I discovered today there's a big differencen between 'writing' and putting words on paper [well, virtual paper]. At the moment I'm doing the latter. I'm putting down scenes, but there's no finesse there right now. That's okay, because I'm better at rewriting than I am at writing, so I'm hopeful that the second and third passes through this story will bring out the nuances I want. Right now, I'm only interested in PLOT, PLOT, PLOT. All the pieces need to fit together before I can polish them up.