May 22, 2025
Last Saturday I attended the Michigan Romance Writers monthly meeting (via Zoom). I’m not always home or able to get on-line the third Saturday of the month, but I made it this time, and I’m so glad I did. It was great seeing some of the writers I’ve known for years, the business meeting was […]
May 12, 2021
In last week’s blog, Pamela S. Thibodeaux told how she had to rewrite a book in order to get it right. I’m in the early stages of my work-in-progress, but during a critique session I discovered I needed to rewrite a scene to get it right. Sounds easy enough; however, rewriting one scene may have […]
February 3, 2021
Nowadays, most writers can’t simply write a story, send it off to an agent or publisher and sit back and wait for the praise and money. Of course, it’s always been true for most writers that once the story has been written, they must take off their writer’s hat and put on their editor’s hat. […]
November 11, 2020
How good is your eyesight? Can you catch all of the errors in your manuscript? I’m in the process of doing a final read-through before I send my manuscript for Something to Crow About to my editor. The ms has been read, criticized, and edited by four Beta Readers. And, of course, before I sent […]
August 30, 2017
I’ve been blogging about the need for an editor and ways to find one. Most writers also have an inner editor. You know what I mean. It’s that little voice in our head that says… You can’t write That sucks No one will want this story Give up (This list could go on and on. […]
August 9, 2017
I’ve been reading and critiquing some unpublished chapters lately, and I’ve come across two common errors that many new writers make. Telling too much The first mistake is when the writer includes a lot of information that isn’t really necessary to the story. Sometimes this is backstory (I want to tell you all about this […]
December 21, 2016
My husband and I have communication problems. He’ll ask, “What do you think of it?” I believe he’s talking about the book I’m reading, but he’s talking about the wine I’m drinking. After a couple comments back and forth that make no sense to either of us, I discover what “it” is. IT, is a […]
November 30, 2016
Recently I attended a Mid-Michigan RWA Chapter meeting where the program was on editing. The speaker, Dr. Diana Stout, MFA PhD, is one of MMRWA’s members and besides being a writer has taught college English for several years. During the meeting, she covered punctuation from comma rules to words to avoid. Lately, I’ve noticed an […]
January 27, 2016
Normally I would go from formatting to point-of-view or verb tense when writing about craft, but last week I read two items that I wanted to share. According to UNESCO over 2.2 million books are published each year. The word “over” is because the count only includes books with an ISBN. There are also many […]
February 27, 2013
Are we there yet? We’ve heard that question from our kids and sometimes from our spouse. Whenever I teach a class on writing, I hear a similar question: How do you know when you’re finished? What the writer is asking is how do you know when the story you’ve written is the best it can […]
September 12, 2012
Which is best, to self-publish your book or go with a traditional publisher? My answer is always: “Depends.” (And no, I don’t mean those undergarments for the elderly.) IMO it depends on the type of book and the writer. Over the years I’ve run into many men and women who have written a memoir. The […]