If I were given a choice between writing a synopsis and writing a blurb (and believe me, that’s a horrible choice), I’d go with the synopsis. Synopses are basically summaries, and most of us have some experience with summarizing. You’ve got three or four pages, and your main job is to pick out the major […]
A while ago I took a workshop in which the presenter recommended writing a sentence summing up the purpose of each paragraph in a chapter just to make sure all the paragraphs were necessary. At the time, that struck me as torture—and, to be honest, it still does. But the idea behind the exercise was […]
Well, I have a lovely new cover (at left), but the MS is still being edited. Editing with fiction means several things since there are several rounds of edit for most novels. The first edits come from your editor at the publishing house, and those are usually the most grueling. The editor isn’t particularly concerned […]
Billionaires are in. If you go to Amazon and search for “billionaire” and “romance,” you’ll find a hundred pages of titles. Fifty Shades of Grey is probably the most prominent of these books, but there are lots of others, and the trend has been around for years. I remember reading Christina Dodd’s Just the Way […]
One of my many New Year’s resolutions is to blog more often (or at least more regularly). I’d also like to keep my readers more up-to-date on what’s going on with my books. So I’ve decided to follow the publication journey of my latest book, Finding Mr. Right Now, through all the steps until it […]
A famous author (whose name I can’t remember, darn it, but it may have been Larry McMurtry) once said that it’s easy to make readers cry. You write about a beautiful child and give it a beautiful dog, and then you kill the dog. Instant tears. But he went on to point out that, in […]
So I live in Colorado. I’ll now pause for the obligatory pot joke. It’ll probably be some variation on “Rocky Mountain High.” At this point, trust me, Coloradoans have heard every possible variation on the “Rocky Mountain High” joke. If we laugh, it’s because we’re basically polite people. Two years ago, in 2012, Colorado voted […]
I enjoy showbiz biographies, the good, the bad, and even the ugly. If you’re an old-time movie fan like me, it’s fun to read anecdotes from people who were involved in making pictures you enjoy—or even pictures you didn’t like much. My most recent read was Robert Wagner’s autobiography Pieces Of My Heart, and I […]
So William Giraldi wrote this article in the New Republic a couple of months ago about Fifty Shades of Grey. You’ll notice I’m not providing a link to said article—feel free to look it up if you want, but I’m not giving Giraldi any more clicks than he’s already gotten. The article is another in […]
So I’m sitting in this workshop listening to this Very Famous Writer (VFW) talk about how to write. She’s obviously a major catch for the workshop organizers because she’s willing to spend over an hour telling aspiring writers how to do it. Now I’m well past the aspiring point (for better or worse), but I’m […]
