The world can be a cruel place. Last week, another sad story from the YA community made the rounds on the internet, Amélie Wen Zhao, would-be author of a new YA fantasy series, was bullied by overzealous social activists into pulling the first book of the series, Blood Heir, from publication just months before its …
Short stories are hard. I’ve always known that I prefer writing novels to short stories, and now that I’m trying my hand at short fiction again, I remember why. I’ve already talked about why I think it’s important for me to write short stories right now, and none of those reasons are that all the …
A close friend recently asked me how I manage to be a writer. This is a very vague question, but when I asked her to elaborate, I found it was really a question about time management. I’ll paraphrase it as, “How do you have time to attempt to launch a writing career, given everything that’s …
Over the course of working on Laz, I’ve come to learn a lot about myself as a writer. One of those things is that sometimes I have the attention span of a goldfish. This is particularly dangerous when conducting research. Research is usually necessary for writing fiction novels. Writers are bound to run into topics …
Something that I’ve been seeing a lot lately is “Said is Dead” meaning that a writer shouldn’t use “said” when writing dialogue and instead use something from a provided list of extravagant dialogue tags that some blogger put together. I disagree with this. “Said” has become the go-to word in dialogue for a reason. When …
Today I’m going to address something that is currently helping me out immensely in continuing my rough draft of Laz: Writing scenes out of order. If you have experience in writing novels, you may be thinking well, duh, but writing out of order was something that I was dead set against when I first started …
It seems that I write this post every few months now, an excuse or explanation of why I haven’t been writing. This time, the difference is that there’s no apology attached, to myself or anyone else. I haven’t written in the past few months because I have truly been unable to. My life has seen …
This week’s DTT will revolve around time management, something that I’ve had a lot of ups and downs with over the years. It applies to writing just as much as anything else. Let’s dive right in: My struggles with time management are nothing new. It’s something I never had to learn how to do effectively …
So it turns out that I couldn’t really get anything done over the holidays, or since. Maybe this was foreseeable. However, today I finally sat down in my little closet/office and actually wrote words. Like, Words. (*Angels sing.*) Hopefully this marks the beginning of a pattern. I want to be able to write a little bit every …