World building

For the last few months, I’ve been reading the Black Dagger Brotherhood series by JR Ward. A friend of mine sent me the first and after I got over the character names, I was hooked… okay sometimes the names the author comes up with still make me groan but not enough to stop reading.
Back on [...]

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Making back your advance

When I first started down the path to ‘published’ over five years ago, I dreamed of Royalty checks. I thought it would be so cool to work for a year and get royalties forever after. HAH. Yeah, I took off those glasses and learned the industry, or I should say began to learn the industry [...]

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Tattoo

Congratulations to Paul Mitton who was brave enough to describe the tattoo. As promised, Paul, you can either have a copy of Perfect Circle or a future copy of The Devil You Know. So, are you a betting man? Also as promised, below is my description of the tattoo.

A dark tattoo twisted down the right [...]

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Jessica Faust on Queries

Jessica Faust at Bookends has a wonderful blog today on queries. If you’re a writer and don’t follow Bookends, you should and I don’t say that lightly. Jessica gives common sense, friendly and knowledgeable advice about the writing industry and the quest for publication and readers
In this blog, she suggests you find a few friends (50 [...]

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Thank you, Twitter

When I worked in accounting, I had no problem taking time off from numbers. In fact, my checkbook never looked so unbalanced.
This Thursday, I decided I needed a break from writing, editing, the whole thing. When you’re a writer, you don’t work 9-5, at least I don’t. I work in stolen batches time throughout [...]

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What I’d like to say in a query letter.

I know that it’s all about the writing, the story, but every so often, I’d like to write a different kind of query. So I indulged. A disclaimer: This kind of letter would never work in real life. Agents do need to know what you write, but writing this query was fun. : )
 
 
Dear “Name of [...]

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Queries

Yesterday was a typical Monday. I hit the snooze one time too many and ran around like the proverbial chicken all morning. I wore sweats and declared it an ‘in’ day, because I forgot to do laundry on the weekend… but one thing is vastly different: I sent the first query for The Devil You [...]

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Patience? What’s that?

Now I know why agents have to ask you to finish a manuscript before you send a query.
 
When I first started querying agents, I read that little instruction with a bit of disbelief. Why wouldn’t you finish the manuscript? Now, no longer a complete novice, I know.
 
I hate waiting. Waiting for a possible rejection or even [...]

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Discipline

First an admission: I am not the most disciplined person in the world. Too often, I’ve sat down to write and instead played a game of solitaire, you know to relax, or checked my email, twitter, blog stats or checked on some of the blogs I follow, posted a comment and the next thing I [...]

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Can you hear that?

It’s the sound of the last nail in Awakening’s coffin. I know, dramatic, give me a break I’m dealing with something here. As you may of guessed I heard back from wonderful agent with a not-so-wonderful rejection of the manuscript. Don’t get me wrong, it was polite, respectful, even kind… and enough to make me [...]

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