Writers like to talk about writing in a cave. But until recently, that was only a metaphor for me. Lately, though, I’ve found that my creativity flows better if I pull the shades tight and keep the lights off. Then I open my manuscript in Scrivener’s composition mode. This way I only see my text document […]
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I sometimes get asked why I set my current series, WAR, in West Africa. Back in 2014 I wrote a blog post about this for Cynthia Woolf’s blog. I have a link to a PDF version of this post on the WAR series page, but I’ve pasted the full text below. One of the ironies of […]
Continue readingToday, over on the Not Your Usual Suspects blog, I talk about what happens When the Story Just Doesn’t Work. I hope you’ll stop by and check it out! Tweet0 Share0 Pin0 Share +10
Continue readingI’m very sad to hear that All Romance eBooks is closing as of December 31, 2016. If you’ve purchased any of my books from their site but haven’t downloaded them yet, you need to download them before December 31st.
Continue readingWhen you think of a storyteller, do you imagine a person sitting at a campfire speaking to an enthralled group? Or a writer putting words on the page? Have you ever thought about ballet as a form of storytelling? If not, then I encourage you to watch this YouTube video. It’s a broadcast of a rehearsal […]
Continue readingIn the course of writing a book I often need to put myself into the heads of my characters. No surprise there. What continues to surprise me is how often I need to think like a landscape designer, architect, or interior designer in order to make certain that my characters have the environmental support (or […]
Continue readingOnce again I’m using my whiteboard to plot out the action. Unfortunately, this takes up nearly my entire dining table! I’m getting very good at moving the whiteboard from the table to the floor without spilling too many of the figures. 😉
Continue readingI’m in the process of revising the first draft of book three in the WAR series, WAR: Opposition. In order to keep straight where the hero and heroine are in their relationship, I made this handy-dandy Romance Meter. 😀 As I’m working on a scene I move the arrow to indicate how far they’ve […]
Continue readingOne of the things that I struggle with as a writer is how to organize all my pre-planning work. That’s the characters sketches, the setting description, the major plot points, etc. The writers behind the Self-Publishing Podcast Sean Platt, Johnny B. Truant, and David Wright decided that there needs to be a specific app for […]
Continue readingNovember is National Novel Writing Month aka NaNoWriMo. This event involves thousands of writers from across the globe who are each attempting to complete a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month. This will be my first year participating and I’m going to be working on a special project. In preparation, I drew a diagram of […]
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