The other day while we were taking our evening walk, he told me about a “stupid mistake” (is there any other kind?) he’d made. Then he quoted the man who taught him carpentry, saying, “The sign of a good carpenter is the ability to cover up your mistakes and make them work.” This is a concept I’m familiar with. In art, we do this. You make a mistake in an oil painting, it’s no problem, just repaint it. That’s trickier in watercolor, but perfection is elusive at best, so you f

Yes, there was a wedding in the middle of June which took me away for a week, but other than that, I’ve been home—even more than usual. And yes, I’ve needed to spend a lot of time working on the lay-out and typesetting of the Grey Area manuscript. That is now, I’m happy to report, at the proofreading stage. Almost ready! Release in late October! And yes, there’s the Grey Area Inidegogo campaign, now just finishing its first week. Visit us here and pick out one of our perks to

Hey, we all know it. Writers sit too much. And the longer we sit, the more we read about how damaging sitting is. It’s enough to make us too depressed to exercise! But there’s no way around it, writing is sedentary work…or is it? After coveting Sherry D. Ramsey’s treadmill desk for about six months, I finally convinced my husband Barry to help me set up one of my own. Yes, we were both afraid I might not use it after going to the expense and trouble. But I had thought about i

For the last week or so, I’ve been working on the novel I wrote in November during NaNoWriMo. Today I admitted to myself, that while effort has been expended [passive voice has been used], I’m flailing. I’ve been changing this, changing that, working obsessively on that all-important opening scene, but with very little strategy in mind. My novel’s in pretty good shape considering it was written in a month. I started at the beginning and moved through it in an orderly way. I u

As for the book itself, I’m still not sure about my title, “Plasticity.” I like it and it fits the subject matter, but it probably sells nothing. Perhaps that’s something to worry about three years from now when I’m still whipping the story into shape. Or…maybe it could be the title of the series. Hah. I know what that is. It’s my Delusions of Grandeur, which rise to the surface when I’ve just completed a first draft…of anything! Here’s my pitch: A young scientist reluctantly

The thing I’m most proud of after successfully finishing NaNoWriMo is that I made no foolish pledge to blog everyday during the month. The first five days I wanted to. It was a good feeling to complete my main course and then finish off with a little blogging dessert. But after day five, the novel filled me up. I got a lot of pleasure knowing that I hadn’t made a stupid public promise to blog the process! Now, having completed the month in fine form and having had a couple of

First, Chuck gives us a tool that will check your writing excerpt for readability. It gives an amazing level of detail. You will get a table with several grade level rating scales, so you can see what reading level the writing is geared toward. This information can be especially useful when writing YA. It also provides sentence information (percent of passive sentences!), word usage (number of adverbs!) (number of “to be” verbs!) and even what kinds of words your sentences st

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Do not give out your first drafts. Do at least one complete revision before submitting it to someone else. Use family members with caution. Because they know you well, relatives may have difficulty critiquing what is on the page, but may instead bring irrelevant knowledge about you into the feedback. They may be too close to be honest or overly critical without realizing it. This is not a hard and fast rule, as some husbands and wives or mothers and sons critique each other e

[singlepic id=7 w=320 h=240 float=left]Getting a writing project to the completed draft stage is delightful, but there’s a downside. If we were visual artists or dancers or actors, we could show off all our hard work. There would be an audience or viewers or, at the very least, we could hang it on the wall or look at ourselves in the mirror and gaze at our work’s glory in the privacy of our homes. When we writers have a precious project that we’ve sweated over and brought t