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Prose or Poetry
Her cat lay languid, a pooling shadow on the floor as the leaf-dappled sunlight rippled and slid across the tiles. Then she glided, soundlessly, from room to room, the light seeming to follow her. The sun swiftly sped from the house as daylight succumbed to dark. And with it all hope of redemption was lost.…
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Writing about Bad Things
I know there are bad things in the world. I know that bad things happen every day. But I am not at peace with the knowledge and I never will be. I have a hard time accepting it. I’m working on my latest novel again after a long pause to focus on making jewelry and…
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Leave Your Ego out of It
Don’t try to be too clever in your writing. Even your husband who knows you very well might still be stymied by a convoluted turn of phrase. Or even something simple, really. Maybe it’s more a comment on your husband than your writing. But still, don’t try to be too clever. It might just shove…
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Life and Expectations
It’s never what you expect. Sometimes it’s better. Writing something when you feel good is very different from writing something when you feel badly. The previous statement is a prime example. There are many days when I might have written this instead: It’s never what you expect. Sometimes it’s worse. The main thing everyone should…
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Trust the Reader
The hard part of creating a good story isn’t deciding what to put in. It seems to me that what you leave out matters most. I read once that Lee Child had to learn to trust the reader. And by that, he meant trust the reader to fill in the details. His opinion was that…
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To AI or Not to AI
As we are approaching NaNoWriMo, I’ve become aware of the debate over the use of AI in meeting the challenge of writing 50,000 words during the month of November. It can be either simply 50,000 words or you can finish a novel, but the novel has to be at least 50,000 words. My initial reaction…
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I Hit the Publishing Button
Proof reading is a pain in the back side. I can understand why authors pay proof readers to do the work for them. Not only is it tedious, but having written and re-written and read and re-read the novel (“As Luck Might Have It”), I’ve become so familiar with it that I can no longer…
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As Luck Might Have It
Shortly before I finished the manuscript for “As Luck Might Have It,” I went to Kindle Direct Publishing and set up the book. KDP offers a hardcover option these days. I have yet to avail myself of that. So far, I am staying with paperbacks and eBooks. One of the hardest parts about setting up…
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Chapters
I have a lot of trouble with chapters. Sometimes I think that if a book has too many chapters, it gets unwieldy. By that I don’t mean that the book gets too long. Just that when my chapter numbers start getting up there into the fifties (and is it better to write the number out…
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Outlining a Novel
I’ve never outlined a novel. Okay, so I’ve only written five novels and independently published them. So far, I’ve had a general idea of how I wanted the story to move along and sort of let the characters carry it there. I do usually know how I want it to end. It’s just that getting…
Maddie's Mom Writes 