Life rocks for Facebook, Google and other high-income, high-tech geeky types in Silicon Valley. In Sparks, the same is true for those living in Crescent City, and it’s even more upscale coastal neighbor Skye Pointe. They work hard. They play hard. At the end of the day, they stagger home – or somewhere else – […]
Yep, here’s another one in my bait-n-switch meme. Not those kind of lines… The ones I’m talking about are storylines. Why are they called that? Lines are boring. Once drawn, they just sit there. Doing nothing. Whomever named them should change the name. Instead, I see story waves. Each made up of rising action, climax, falling […]
Previously, I thought I had a way to portray dual timelines–vignettes. Now I know that they will work for some cases, but not for all. I have to use the best technique for story advancement. It may be a flashback. It may be one or more scenes. It could be a chapter. It could even be […]
I love creating stories with intelligent heroines–especially the ones for whom the television is simply their largest computer monitor. However, the backstory for the heroine in my new novel is giving me fits. How can I hide a crucial piece of her personal history from her? If it’s anywhere on the World Wide Web, […]
Warrior. That’s what the Cowardly Lion is in comparison with me last week. I’d been hiding from my manuscript since that Monday. More than one hundred pages into a four hundred page rewrite, and I choked – scared off by this one scene. I had outlined it, decomposed it, and placed its elements in my […]
Hello…hello…hellooo… Where are you…are you…yooou… Echoes resounded from the void in my timeline. I’d been so focused on tightly winding the action that I’d overlooked the leap from Sunday morning to Monday morning. Sunday afternoon and evening didn’t exist. Once I’d stumbled across the hole, I saw that it should have been painfully obvious. Having […]
Now that I’ve eliminated my intrusive voice, coaxed the plots and subplots to play nicely together, gotten control of pacing, and overcome my hesitance with love scenes, it’s time to complete the set of revision artifacts (outline and scene notes) for moving the plots toward their climaxes. I was very excited about getting to this […]
My biggest nemesis – the love scene. I interrupted my progress this week, working myself into a snit about it. The way my story is written, the scenes have to be hot and passionate; expressing the love between two strong, independent people. The problem? I’m not that into sex. Let me clarify – I’m not that […]
