Hello all! I have exciting editing news. This afternoon I finished the second draft of my current WIP, sometimes known as Laz here on the blog. I’m happy with how it’s improved since the first draft was completed more than a year ago. Here’s some information about it: Age Group: Young Adult Genre: Post Nuke …
Throughout the long process of this first round of revisions, I’ve learned a lot about myself as a writer. Unfortunately, one of those things is that I seem to have no idea how to properly use commas. Regular readers of this blog are already well aware of this, I’m sure. Consider the following example from …
Over the course of working on Laz, I’ve come to learn a lot about myself as a writer. One of those things is that sometimes I have the attention span of a goldfish. This is particularly dangerous when conducting research. Research is usually necessary for writing fiction novels. Writers are bound to run into topics …
Something that I’ve been seeing a lot lately is “Said is Dead” meaning that a writer shouldn’t use “said” when writing dialogue and instead use something from a provided list of extravagant dialogue tags that some blogger put together. I disagree with this. “Said” has become the go-to word in dialogue for a reason. When …
Editing update: I’ve finally finished my first readthrough of my book. Here’s What it looks like. Reading it all the way through was a more difficult task than I anticipated. The huge number of mistakes and areas of bad writing don’t make for smooth reading, especially when I have to stop each time I find …
Big update here: I’m pleased to announce that I’ve finally finished the rough draft of my book. That’s right, Laz has reached the stage where if it were to be read, beginning to end, the reader might consider it to be a book. I feel like I didn’t emphasize the “rough” part of rough draft …
A while back I wrote this post, in which I discuss all the different things that I listen to at one time or another while I write. At the moment, I’m all about the music, especially anything by Alt-J. Can’t get enough of that weirdness. Here’s a link to their rendition of House of the …
Today I’m going to address something that is currently helping me out immensely in continuing my rough draft of Laz: Writing scenes out of order. If you have experience in writing novels, you may be thinking well, duh, but writing out of order was something that I was dead set against when I first started …
This week’s DTT will revolve around time management, something that I’ve had a lot of ups and downs with over the years. It applies to writing just as much as anything else. Let’s dive right in: My struggles with time management are nothing new. It’s something I never had to learn how to do effectively …
Time for some weekend fun. As it turns out, not all of the internet is useless. In this post, I’ll briefly explain four of my favorite websites to use when I’m in a bind. Here goes: Thesaurus.com Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first, shall we? I find Thesaurus.com to be most …