My writing for publication goes first to my agent, then to an editor, then (if accepted) to a copy editor and production. So the agent’s call or email to give me his reaction to whatever (book, shorter work) is usually my first *professional* assessment of its strengths and weaknesses. The eyes on the work are Read More…
Category: the writing life
Fast Tips for Tightening Your Writing
Whether it’s a letter, essay, short story, or longer pieces, here are some easy ways to make it tighter, snappier, and (if you’re up against a word limit) shorter. Go active: change passive voice (“He was hit by a truck”) to active voice (“A truck hit him.”) Watch for sneaky forms of passive by scanning Read More…
Do Writers Need a Degree? (Did They Ever?) (Does Anybody?)
In the pedantic fashion of those with degrees, I will start off with qualifications of the topic…it depends…on what the writer’s writing, what the writer intends to do with what the writer is writing, what outside sources the writer might need to explore to cover the chosen subject…and which degree we’re talking about. The value Read More…
SQUIRREL!!
There’s a charming blogsite called Scientist Sees Squirrel where Steven Heard writes about his research, others’ research, writing for science, history of science (his new book is Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider) that I used to read a lot until NewBook dragged me deep into Ky Vatta, the family, and Slotter Key, the Read More…
A Good/Bad/Odd/Sad/Happy Medley
I didn’t feel great yesterday evening, so skipped the choir Zoom meeting and went to bed. And this morning….a migraine. Overnight clouds had moved in and a wind from the south. After a couple of hours trying to argue myself into wellness (waste of time and I know it, but often can’t act on it Read More…
Revision: Firing Up the Chainsaw
Like everything else in writing, there are many ways to approach revision, and I’ve written quite a bit about the process elsewhere. But every writer and every project has unique challenges. For NewBook, I’m choosing a slower (since I have no deadline) but thorough and reliable method to cope with its nature and history. I Read More…
NewBook Has an End
About 1:20 pm today, NewBook attempted the “trickling away” ending (which usually means the real ending is some pages back) and sure enough, the real ending was some pages back. It’s found its end. Now comes the chainsaw of correction, the gorilla glue of mending and patching, the jewelers’ rouge for polishing, and weeks more Read More…
Music, Horse Videos, and Approaching Completion
Toward the end of a day, I write in shorter bursts, interspersed with taking a look at Elphick Event Ponies, Life on the Left Rein, Footluce Eventing, and other vlogs involving horses, both training and competing in things I like to watch. I also listen to music (non-vocal usually) to keep the longer sections of Read More…
Soup & Story
Many people–I among them–have used the image of a giant soup pot for the writer’s mind and stories. Everything around goes into the pot, the pot bubbles along, and at some point out comes a bowl of something good. I notice increasingly though that what comes out depends on how the writer conceives of story…should Read More…
What Writers Argue About
Writers argue about everything. We hold different views on what other writers *should* write about, what topics are too something (ordinary, fantastic, political, politically naive, mundane, exotic, narrow, broad…) or not enough something (same list), how writers should handle certain topics, if writers should use some hot-button term, whether a phrase in common use 150 Read More…