Pre-dawn is my time. I wake up at 4:30 a.m., french press my coffee, feed the animals, get a tall glass of water, sometimes enjoy a mandarin orange, and then do something productive. In 2018 that productive thing was go to the gym for an hour and run five miles. In 2019, that productive thing … Continue reading Wake up! Time to Query.
The eternally-wise "they" say that you get rejected 99 times before you get a buy in on your novel or submitted piece of work. But even knowing this intellectually, getting a pass on a manuscript still sucks. For me, the first couple were a particular drag. It's like getting dumped after the first date. On … Continue reading Query Rejections
When I decided to go to the 2019 Writer's Digest conference, it was 95% due to their Pitch Slam event. If you are unfamiliar with conference pitching events, they're basically a supplemental feature to a writing conference where writers get a very short amount of time to pitch their work to agents who are open to considering … Continue reading The Writer’s Digest Conference Pitch Slam Experience
I powered through and finished hot mess #1. I like it! I feel good about it! It's a book I would like to read, and would have adored and probably read over and over when I was in middle/high school. But now, in order to get other people to read it and hopefully make money … Continue reading The Thing About Query Letters
Despite literally doing social media for a living, I am missing out on an entire writing community on Twitter. I tend to tweet and provide social media for brands and spend little to no time on my own social media. That means my personal branding is limping along. At the urging of a friend, I … Continue reading #WritingHashtags
I've been struggling lately with my manuscript, Hot Mess #1. I made a bit of a breakthrough last night, but I didn't do anything in December and January has been a slow start. My laundry list of excuses includes: Several instances of snow, which somehow made it impossible to write. Illness, where I spent several … Continue reading Level 3 Writer, Level 34 Human
Happy New Year! Today I am going to share with you my writing goals for the first quarter of the year. I use a goals journal called the "Best Self" journal. Browse and get excited about it by clicking here. Basically it takes the premise of "time blocking," or scheduling out every hour of the … Continue reading Writing Resolutions
Yesterday was a bad day. Today is shaping up to be a bad day. It's not the persistent, nagging slow burn of depression or grief, it's just several bad days where things just happen that suck. My trainer quit, for example. I had some family drama to deal with. And my beloved manuscript earned its … Continue reading When crappy days derail NaNoWriMo
Last weekend I went to my local writer's conference in Virginia Beach. The Hampton Roads Writers Conference is small, (at least I think it is, I've never actually been to a writer's conference before,) but there was a ton of great ideas, insight, networking, and practice for writers of all types. It was a completely … Continue reading Well, I Submitted
The Merry Manuscript 