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Category: Writing

An Open Letter to Writers of Every Stripe

An Open Letter to Writers of Every Stripe

My first literary read was The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. I found it on my paternal grandmother’s bookshelves, alongside works by Edgar Rice Burroughs and J.T. McIntosh. I was a locust back then, devouring any and every story I could find: Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines, pulp SciFi and Fantasy from the ’60s, my maternal grandfather’s college literature and theological texts, whatever I could lay my hands on at the library, or at the homes of my parents’ friends…

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Pay the Author by C.D. Watson
Please Pay the Author

Please Pay the Author

I give away a lot of books every month. Each giveaway is motivated by a strong purpose. Some stories are reader magnets for my newsletters. The Death Mask of Adlivun Cavus (C.D. Watson) and Death Omen (Celia Roman), while also available for sale (here and here), were both written to entice readers to subscribe to my newsletters. Others are a way to hook readers into a series, especially series that are difficult to advertise, which most of my books are….

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Mother Mary by C.D. Watson
Mother Mary

Mother Mary

I write a lot of characters that are mothers. Many of the women in the Daughters of the People Series are mothers, for example, and several of the short stories in Apocalypse Weird are narrated by mothers or include mothers who play important roles in their respective stories. Part of this is due to my own state of motherhood; I’ve been a happy mother of one for more than two decades now. It’s therefore natural for me to create characters…

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What's Past Is Prologue by C.D. Watson
What’s Past Is Prologue

What’s Past Is Prologue

I’m re-reading the Daughters of the People Series (Lucy Varna) to refresh my memory on the characters, events, and writing style, in preparation for developing and writing the final novel, War’s Last Refuge. The Prophecy, the first book in the series, was the very first novel I finished and published, and also the first one I rewrote. It’s been interesting to read just to see how my writing has changed. More, it was a complete surprise to discover how good…

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The Vampyr: The Complete Series by V.R. Cumming
An Emotional Journey

An Emotional Journey

I received the proof of the print edition of The Vampyr Series omnibus (V.R. Cumming) in the mail today. This thing is massive. While the cover size is 6×9″, the same as the individual novels in the series, the spine is about 2″ thick. It needed to be. The print edition is 776 pages long and contains over 390,000 words of story. Yeah, big. First thing after I got it, I flipped through it, checking page counts and print quality,…

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Outgrowing Mentors by C.D. Watson
It’s Ok to Outgrow Your Mentors

It’s Ok to Outgrow Your Mentors

I started researching self-publishing a couple of years before publishing my first novel in 2014. Richard, my editor and a close friend, discovered Joe Konrath’s blog way back in, gosh, 2012 or so. Maybe earlier! From there, we slowly began consuming the wisdom of other indie authors. Dean Wesley Smith and his “Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing” posts. His wife Kris Rusch, whose weekly “Business Musings” are a personal favorite. David Gaughran of Let’s Get Digital fame, and Joanna…

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Evolving Plots by C.D. Watson
Evolving Plots

Evolving Plots

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for Witch Hollow (Celia Roman) and other stories in the Sunshine Walkingstick Series. When I’m working on a story, it’s not unusual for random ideas about future stories within that story world to come to me in odd moments. I keep dedicated pages in my OneNote story folders precisely for recording those moments, usually labeled “Ideas.” Sometimes the ideas are simply titles, sometimes they’re characters, and sometimes entire plot threads pop into my head. Today, I’d…

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Play YOUR Game by C.D. Watson
Play YOUR Game

Play YOUR Game

Last Friday, my sister’s high school basketball team (she’s the coach) played in the first round of the state tournaments in their division. The team did well during the first three periods by first maintaining an even score with their opponent (the defending state championships) and then pulling ahead. In the fourth period, the opposing team pushed back with a full-court defensive press and an aggressive offense, and pulled ahead of us. Meanwhile, our girls were struggling to defend a…

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Sunshine Walkingstick Book 5 by Celia Roman
The Great Thing about Sunshine

The Great Thing about Sunshine

A while back, I wrote a blog post about how difficult Sunshine Walkingstick (Celia Roman) can be to write. At the time, I was completely burned out on Sunshine from pushing myself to write and release three books in the series back to back (common advice in self-publishing circles). I was certain I would never work on Sunny again. And yet again, I proved myself wrong. I ended up adding a third short story and a fourth book to the series,…

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Redemption (Daughters of the People, Book 6.5) by Lucy Varna
Redemption

Redemption

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t read the entire Daughters of the People Series to date, you may want to do so before reading this post as it contains serious spoilers. I’m working on Redemption, the penultimate Daughters of the People novel, right now. Well, I’ve been working on it for quite a while, since October 2017 to be precise. Long before that, I added the title in as an extra to the series. India Furia, the main female character, kept…

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