June 2018

First, some news and updates. I will not have much time for blogging or working on my novels until early August so that this site will be inactive for most of July. I do have some plans for this time; however, and thought I would share them with you. I am starting to research book cover artists and will continue to look at the options through July. I do not have a title and will need a completed first draft to write the sales copy for a cover, so this is just research.  I am starting to search for an artist for the interior of my first fiction...

    I wanted to follow up on the topic of index cards this week. I spent years struggling to write effectively, and it usually started well and died after a few pages. Why did this happen? I felt like I had an amazing story in my head, but when it came time to put it on paper it was broken and terrible. I decided to try outlining my novels, but I invariably ended up getting stuck because the process was the same series of "what comes next?" that I struggled with when writing without an outline. I already tried to explain this in the previous post, but it is such...

The writing process is something that everyone has to figure out for themselves. For me, as a computer professional by day, it turns out that handwritten index cards are the best way to flesh out a scene list or outline. Part of this may be age, but I spend so much time with computers that outlining manually with cards allows me be more creative. There is something "real" about physically writing on cards/ I thought I would describe my experience working with index cards, as I am starting my first novel and am excited to see how using index cards speeds my process. I wrote...

I have wanted to write for most of my life, starting with handwritten stories I shared with my elementary school friends. I joined NaNoWriMo in 2010 and successfully wrote 50k words once in 2013. While this was a great experience and led me to the decision to write seriously, it showed me how difficult writing could be given our busy lives. To that end, I have given myself some deadlines, which I will discuss in later posts. What I want to discuss today is planning. When I made my NaNoWriMo attempts, I wrote without outlines and quickly ran into issues where I was unsure were to take...