Archive for the ‘On writing’ Category
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My 10-no 18-page paper on my greatest weakness
Friday, January 13th, 2012
Yes, I'm an overachiever. This was a great assignment. The short version is that each author I analyzed showed what the character was thinking in different ways. Imagine that. So, in my writing I've got to stay true to my voice, my character's voice, and dig deeper. My paper can be viewed as a pdf. [...]
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The Big Writing Assignment, A 10 page paper for fun
Wednesday, December 7th, 2011
My next writing exercise from Finding Your Voice is to write a 10 page paper on my biggest writing weakness, identify authors whose writing is strong in that area, and analyze how they do it. My biggest writing weakness–not by biggest human weakness (we'll save that for another day)–is that I don't show what's going [...]
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Organic images exercises
Friday, December 2nd, 2011
I'm learning to find my voice from Finding Your Voice by Les Edgerton and I'm going to put myself out there and post some of the writing exercises. I'm supposed to "create a line or three that gives a metaphor or image that could only "work" within the parameters of that environment and that environment [...]
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More Connections
Tuesday, September 14th, 2010
This past Friday and Saturday, September 10 and 11, 2010, I attended a writing conference in Boise. And I made connections. Connections with other authors, an editor, and an agent, connections with my own writing, and connections with my past. Wow! That's a lot for one conference to accomplish. With his storytelling skills and emotional [...]
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Meet our Idaho stars. I knew them when…
Tuesday, September 7th, 2010
Three of my writing friends from the Treasure Valley will be speaking on a debut author panel at the "Writing With the Stars" conference this Saturday, September 11th at Boise State University. I first met Sarah Tregay during the Boise writing conference in 2006. She has faithfully attended a writing group and conferences since then. [...]
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Child protagonist triumphs
Monday, August 30th, 2010
When I first started attending a writing group, one of the rules I learned was: Always have the child protagonist solve the problem. Why? Because children like to read about children solving their own problems. In order for a child to solve a problem in a book, the parents and adults must be absent from [...]
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Cheryl Klein from Scholastic
Friday, July 2nd, 2010
I'm looking forward to meeting Cheryl Klein from Scholastic. At the conference last year I met with Brian Farrey, the acquisitions editor for Flux. He said my book, A Kiss and a Curse, reminded him of A Curse Dark as Gold by Elizbeth C. Bunce. I read it and found out that the editor was [...]
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Writing With the Stars SCBWI Conference
Friday, July 2nd, 2010
I'm the conference coordinator for the annual SCBWI conference in Boise this fall. Join us for a great day. Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Writing With the Stars: A Conference for Readers, Writers, and Teachers of Children's Literature September 11, 2010, Saturday Boise State University 1910 University Dr Boise, ID 83725 Student Union [...]
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Books versus Technology
Thursday, July 1st, 2010
There's an ongoing debate about e-books and self publishing and the growing number of ways to be published outside of traditional publishing. Part of me wants to dig in deep and resist these changes. Can't we go back to the old way? I write a pretty good book. I submit it to a few editors. [...]
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The end and the beginning
Monday, May 24th, 2010
I finished the rough draft of my end of the world novel. Yea for me! Hurray! I wrote most of it out in long hand in three notebooks. And now the fun begins. When I write the first draft of a novel, I have to make myself sit down and write for an hour. When [...]