Writing What You Like

A few years back, I ran into a writer who was having a really hard time selling her romance novel.  She started describing it, and it was pretty obvious she was stuck in the 1980s (if you’re not familiar with romance, this was the time when they had “bodice rippers,” something that has changed drastically [...]

Chihuahua/Bat Crossbreeding

No doubt we’ll see this next on a SyFy Channel movie!

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ABCs of Writing – B is for Bibliography

The first book that I completed was set during the Civil War and required a lot of research. Initially, I just did the research, put it into the story, and that was it.  I didn’t note anywhere I’d gotten the inf0rmation from.  During one of the revisions, I realized I probably needed to double check [...]

Transporter Malfunction

A hilarious play on Star Trek!

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Fan Fiction–The Good, Bad, and Ugly

A number of years ago, I was involved in fandom for a TV show, which of course, generated it’s own fan fiction.  That’s stories written by the fans based on the series, using their favorite characters.  I even tried that when I was a teenager–all of three stories–but, because I had been writing regular fiction [...]

ABCs of Writing – A is for Action

When I did one of my earlier projects, a Civil War thriller, I’d seen the advice “Start with the action” and opened the book with an action scene.  In this, I threw eleven characters into the first chapter and in the middle of a fight.  Critters–and agents–had a hard time with it because I didn’t [...]

Is Fiction Writing Art?

Several years back, I went to see a play that an actor friend was starring in.  The lead character was writing a literary novel and was perfectly happy that the book made utterly no sense, to the chagrin of the other characters. All that mattered was that she was being literary and artistic, and part [...]

Things About Writing No One Told Me

Writing a book for the first time is like jumping into a pool without knowing if it’s going to be cold, hot, or comfortable.  It’s easy to find lots of information about how to write them, but there are a few things that no one ever told me that I had to learn along the [...]

What Writing Queries Taught Me

It’s hard to believe that I’m about to launch into submitting queries to agents for MAGIC STUD.  I’m finishing up the edits now and am working on the query letter.  You know, everything I learned about how to do this project right from the start was from writing query letters for the last projects–and the [...]

The White Horse King

The White Horse King, by Benjamin Merkle, is the story of Alfred the Great, the king who fought against the Vikings and introduced other significant changes that are still present today.  One of the things I particularly noticed–as a former solder–was that he restructured the military into an “army of professional soldiers”–not an easy feat!
I [...]