Thank you to Caitlin Sinead Jennings for inviting me to be part of the #MyWritingProcess blog tour. She’s a regular contributor to Trouble the Write Way; her impressive writing process involves Trello and guideposts from Story Engineering. If you haven’t heard of #MyWritingProcess, it’s a sort of blog-posting chain letter in which authors all answer the same four questions about their writing. Here […]
Writing Lessons from the PitchMadness Readers
The first 250 words of a novel may determine its fate. For aspiring authors — especially those seeking representation — pitching contests are therefore incredibly valuable. In Brenda Drake’s #PitchMadness, for example, entrants submitted very minimal information: manuscript title, age category/genre, word count, 35-word pitch, and the first 250 words. There were over 500 entries in […]
The Problem with Prologues
Prologues are a long-running tradition in some genres of fiction, especially epic fantasy. Those of us who grew up reading Robert Jordan and George RR Martin have almost come to expect them at the start of the tome-sized fantasy novel. Most of those who write SFF are also readers of SFF. We’re under the spell; […]
How and Why to Write A Good Opening
It’s a simple fact that people are busy, and have shorter attention spans than ever. We have many things to thank for this: video games, television, and most of all, Twitter. Because books must compete with all of these other forms of entertainment, it’s no longer enough to write a novel that, overall, is good. […]
A Brief Guide to Twitter Pitching
In anticipation of tomorrow’s #AdPit contest on Twitter, I thought it might be useful to assemble some tips about Twitter pitching contests. In case you weren’t aware, the basic premise of such contests is this: Authors tweet a brief (140 characters or less) teaser “pitch” for their completed manuscripts, using a common hashtag Agents and […]
