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, […]
My new work in progress (wip) is on a hit list. In the story, the heroine chases and pins down especially slippery pieces of information. I know who the assassins are – search engines. They have become so ubiquitous that the name of one of them is now the verb for using them all (“Google […]
I started to share another rant about my characters, but Zzzz…. – boring! They’re still misbehaving, but so what? They’re revealing a number of sources of conflict and forcing dramatic irony to materialize. After eighteen months of learning that I needed to rewrite, then learning how to rewrite and finally – actually doing it, I […]
After struggling with the structure for my new book, I gave up. Yep – I did. Me, the incurable optimist. I waved the white flag, threw in the towel, and then I red read. Lots. And I’m the better for it. I have learned that I was having so much trouble with this new novel because […]
By the time I recognized that I had been tying myself up in knots, I was already in a pretty tight tangle. Too happy that the narrative structure of my new story was all sorted out, I was unprepared to find that the plot structure wasn’t cooperating. The story was complete, already framed in my mind; and […]
November 16, 2010. The day I began the revision outline for the novel that is becoming Sparks. By the very next week I knew that while an outline is a must, it doesn’t give me the level of detail that I need. So I added a storyboard to my revision artifacts, and was still confident […]
It was one of the nights that I spend with other parents who have also accompanied their children to ballet classes. Sometimes there’s conversation, sometimes we’ve brought something to work on, sometimes both. For me, it’s always both – I try never to ignore a nice chunk of writing time. A new gentleman struck up […]
During revision, silkscreening is one thing; constructing a scene is quite another. The complexity of my current WIP makes the process more an intricate choreography than a construction. We know that the basis of scene choreography is the Holy Quarternary of writing – goal, obstacle, action and resolution. In my particular case, many scenes in the story also […]
I’m very excited. I’ve figured out how to make the sometimes revered, sometimes scorned, always discussed writer’s tool work for me. You know the one – the outline. I’d only begun using it because my editor advised that it was the next step for revising the story he’d critiqued. Now I’m outlining because it is […]
With so little free time, what could I write for a blog post this week? Flash fiction? Short story? As much as I love writing and sharing them, there’s no time. I am revising an earlier work. Finish a draft post? There’s one about where my stories fit in the romantic suspense genre. It’s so […]
