Thanks to the wonders of social media, Nat Cassidy, one of my favorite horror and crafters of suspense, posted about a new novella. Lesson: don’t discount posting about your books on social media. Once it crossed my feed, I immediately went to my local bookstore, and wouldn’t you know, they had it in stock. It…
A little while ago, someone posted on a writing community Discord server about submissions for a noir-focused anthology. Navigating over to the submissions page, the anthology focused on flash fiction stories to grip the reader and not let go. Perchance, as part of the NYC Midnight competition, I’d written a sci-fi story (which placed first…
Really short post here, mostly to plug the conversation T.C. Burr and I engaged in on the Yet Podcast: One of my favorite things is chatting about the writing process with other authors. Everyone has tools and tricks they’ve discovered, and hearing about them is amazing. I never know when someone will point me in…
Author’s Note: if you want all the querying resource links and none of my rambling, scroll to the end for a handy list. All pictures are direct links to articles. Here are other writing resources if you’re not querying yet. After my third book (the only book my internal monologue deemed potentially “publishable”), I dove…
The latest controversy to befall NaNoWriMo surrounds their stance on the use of generative AI, primarily LLMs (Large Language Models). As an aside, I loathe the overuse (and misuse) of the term AI, and thus, in this essay, I will use LLM instead of this colloquialism. NaNoWriMo’s post is here, if you desire to read…
One of the superpowers of independent bookstores is how curation can change a shopper’s discovery process of otherwise unnoticed books. Page Against the Machine in Long Beach is an example of such a store, with its focus on media related to activism and social/political movements. It then shouldn’t be a surprise that I came across…
The Queen of the Tearling (QotT) almost got DNF’d in the first fifty pages. A perusing of comments on Goodreads (a bad habit I’ve picked up when struggling with a book) revealed many readers calling the MC a Mary Sue. I’m not a fan of this term, though many aspects of the MC fit the…
For more general writing books, see here Structural writing books Jessica Brody: Save the Cat! Writes a Novel Had to mention this one. Save the Cat! started as a book for screenwriters and then years later was re-written to focus on novel writing. What this book does amazingly well is lay out the general ‘beats’…
For this week, I’ll switch it up and list some of the podcasts (here for some writing books) which have helped immensely over the years. We don’t always have time to sit and absorb a book, but podcasts have been integrated into our lives over the last decade, and on a commute or while folding…
As part of my goal to write on this blog more often, I’ll sporadically post the writing resources that have helped me. No doubt, as you march along on your wiring journey, others will suggest books, podcasts, websites, etc, they’ve used or found helpful, and with almost all of these, the common refrain is: Your…