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 set the rather auspicious goal of completing a totally new manuscript over winter break, which was about two weeks. I didn't start from scratch- I had a solid outline I'd been tweaking off and on for a few months and a few thousand words. I figured if I had first mess of a draft … Continue reading Goals: Achieved and Set
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
The day I discovered that I could run and listen to audiobooks at the same time was life changing. I subscribed to Audible that day. It's a little shameful, actually. My library's free app, Hoopla, got me started on audiobooks and I don't know why I made the switch from complimentary to an app that … Continue reading Reading the Genre
April is Camp NaNoWriMo! I have set a goal for myself of 30 hours of time spent doing writing-related things. When I set the goal, I thought that would be 100% revision time. Now that it's April 3rd and I only have a handful of chapters left to edit, I'm beginning to realize it's not … Continue reading What to do with Camp NaNoWriMo
“And what about those [writers' workshop] critiques, by the way? How valuable are they? Not very, in my experience, sorry. A lot of them are maddeningly vague. I love the feeling of Peter's story,someone may say. It had something... a sense of I don't know... there's a loving kind of you know... I can't exactly describe it.... … Continue reading When Are Workshops Helpful?
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
When I was a teen, I had a habit of getting books I loved, reading them, then leaving them all over the house so I could pick them up and read them at all times. My mother loved finding paperbacks strewn across the kitchen table, between couch cushions, even by the toilet. There was a … Continue reading Jean Ferris Is Dead
The whole point of NaNoWriMo was to finish the second novel. I didn't have to start from scratch, I had a decent head start over 10,000 words, but it was still a push. I had days where I wrote a hell of a lot. I had days where I wrote zero. Today I finished. Because … Continue reading Done with 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 