With the release of my next Celia Roman novel A Witch and Her Familiar (Vanessa Kinley, Witch PI, Book 2) a few days past, I’m already anticipating the release of the next book in the series. Mostly, that means the writing end of things. When the manuscript for A Witch and Her Familiar was finalized, I took a couple of weeks off from writing to brainstorm the next book, Black Witch Rising. This is the first novel I’ve brainstormed since…
It’s time again to review the previous year’s progress, personal and professional, and write goals for the coming year. 2022’s focus was on rebuilding my creativity and pulling myself out of burnout. I did this in several ways. The first was by exploring my innate strengths, beginning with the CliftonStrengths test and continuing from there to the Better Faster Academy, a Strengths-focused resource created by Becca Syme, a success coach for writers. I’m not going to bore you with my…
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…
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…
I love my readers. No, really, I do. I write under four (*ahem* or more *ahem*) pen names and so far, nearly every reader for books published under every pen name has been a delight to interact with. But some of you are getting a little impatient. A couple of months ago, I received an email from a fan of the Vampyr Series (V.R. Cumming) that pushed me to write a post detailing exactly what’s been going on in my…
When I first started writing, I fell into a natural pattern and process. I didn’t think about it, didn’t try to force anything or conform to anyone else’s standards. I just did what worked for me at the time, which turned out to be fortuitous. While I had that schedule, I was incredibly productive and loved every single minute of writing. A couple of years in, I decided that I needed to try to “fix” my process so that I…
A few things have happened recently that point to a small problem aspiring authors seem to have. If you haven’t figured it out yet from the title, then here are three examples as illustrations: At a recent book signing by David Joy, one of the guests (inevitably, I think) asked Joy how he came up with ideas for his stories and whether finding ideas was a problem. Not long ago, a reader with in-depth subject knowledge emailed me with intricately…
While writing “Lightning Crack, Thunder Roll,” it occurred to me that other writers might benefit from a discussion of the length of time a story takes to write. Of course, the first answer is the obvious: It depends upon the writing speed (usually measured in words per hour) of the writer. For example, a writer who can crack out 2,000 words per hour can finish the first draft of a novel (say, 70,000 words long) in half the time of…