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Tag: writing

A Witch and Her Familiar (Vanessa Kinley, Witch PI, Book 2) by Celia Roman
2023 Keyword: Finish

2023 Keyword: Finish

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…

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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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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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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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Jumping into the Darkness

Jumping into the Darkness

A few weeks ago, I decided to write a completely new short story just for my monthly newsletter subscribers, a Dark Fantasy taken from a list of ideas I compiled last year when I was working on stories for Dreaming of a Dark Christmas. (That’s on sale for $.99 (US) right now, so if you haven’t read it, hop on over and pick up a copy.) The story is about a mischievous imp who, inspired by the hymn “Joy to…

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How I Wrote My First Novel in Seven Weeks

How I Wrote My First Novel in Seven Weeks

Note: Most of this post was originally published in January 2014 on a now-defunct blog. My process hasn’t changed significantly since then, only now I have the experience to understand exactly how hard it is to write when I deviate too much from this process. Lessons learned! Yesterday*, I promised to share the techniques I used to plot and write my first novel, in the hopes of helping another would-be author who’s having similar problems. I didn’t expect for that…

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