Writing a query letter can be one of the most difficult exercises for a writer to endure. It’s never easy to sum up your full-length novel in a paragraph or two and, if you’re anything like me, you feel like your strength lies in writing, not marketing. But that’s how you have to look at […]
3 Books You Should Read to Improve Your Writing
There are so many books about writing out there that it can be difficult to not only find a good one, but to find one that tells you anything new. I’ve read plenty, but here are the three books that I found the most useful. On Writing – A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen […]
Writing Stories for Children? Check out this free ebook!
Here’s a free ebook by Mabel L. Robinson, available from FreeLanceWriting.com, that is worth checking out if you’re curious about writing books for children. I write the occasional Young Adult stuff, but have never really delved into actual children stories, unless you count the stories I tell my three-year-old at bedtime. To be honest with you, […]
3 Horror clichés I found in my writing (and 2 more you should avoid)
Isn’t it funny how you can read another writer’s story and say, “Wow, how unoriginal. That’s been done a hundred times before,” but somehow totally overlook it when it’s your own work? I went looking through some of my unpublished or unfinished horror stories the other day and realized that one of them was basically […]
10 “Platform Building” Things You Can Do When You’ve Caught Writers Block
It happens to the best of us. You brew a pot of coffee, pick out the most appropriate music for the mood, open up your laptop and put your fingers on the keyboard. And then…nothing. You wait a minute or two, maybe fiddle around with the wording of a couple of paragraphs from a work-in-progress, but […]
Your first draft sucks, but revising it doesn’t have to
“The End” Maybe you’ve waited to type those word for thirty days in November, or maybe you’ve been waiting for several years, adding words to your novel whenever you could find a spare minute. Either way, you’ve finally completed your first novel. You call your friends and update your Facebook status and your non-writer friends […]
Choosing A Pay Scale For Your Short Story
There is a lot to consider when looking at markets to submit your short stories to. From small press print anthologies, to major literary magazines, to niche ezines with limited traffic, a new writer hoping to score some publishing credits has nearly unlimited options. With this post, I want to look primarily how much to […]
5 Steps to Writing and Selling Your First Short Story
One of the reasons I put off writing fiction for as long as I did was that I really had no clear idea of how to start. That might sound a bit foolish, but I honestly felt that if I had no means of publishing my fiction, then writing was basically a waste of time. […]