When querying an agent, I like the ease of the e-mail query. I can research agents, change my query letter to match the agent's taste and send out queries to a couple of agents a day. And I'm being environment-friendly: no paper for the query, no envelope for mailing, no SASE, no form rejection letter [...]

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 [...]

My language arts class is reading We Were Not Alone by Patricia Reece Roper and Karola Hilbert Reece. The students are writing stories from their lives containing symbolism and showing a time they were courageous. We are discussing the elements of story such as character, description using the five senses, and discovering the main character's [...]

I love to read what I want to read. My high school-aged daughter also loves to read books she chooses. But she dislikes analyzing literature and writing a literary analysis. I wrote a literary analysis for the language arts class I teach, and it was painful to write. So why do we study literature and [...]

Not like death and taxes. My husband has his own CPA business, so I'm loving this beautiful spring day after tax day. We went on a walk with our youngest child around the neighborhood after the rest of the children went to school and I smelled lilac and we found a bird's nest in the [...]

I get such a high from submitting, even querying. You would think after almost 100 rejections, I wouldn’t like submitting. But each time I submit, I think, this could be the one. This could be it. This agent and/or editor could love my story. I’m working on my 22nd revision of A Kiss and a [...]

I teach a high school language arts class on-line and today I graded the literary analysis papers for The Virginian by Owen Wister. The students did an excellent job choosing themes and supporting their thesis statements with examples. I intensely added comments about past and present tense and proper use of quotes among other things. [...]

I attended the BYU Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers Conference last summer. From that conference I compiled a list of revision questions. Many of these are from Ann Cannon‘s class. She is an awesome teacher and author and mentor. The list also includes ideas from classes by Dandi Mackall, Ann Dee Ellis, and James [...]

I’m making another commitment to blog regularly. I haven’t decided if that’s once a month or once a week. As a “writer” I feel a lot of pressure to come up with something brilliant and profound and have it sound perfect. Oh, that’s because I’m a perfectionist. Until I come up with brilliant, profound, and [...]

Then include characters who respect each other and wait until marriage to have sex. Include characters who desire to improve.  And include a female in distress who is rescued and fought over between to very attractive and worthy opponents. A study from the University of Missouri found that teen girls desire abstinence and romance. Here’s [...]