Category: reflections

When a chapter is slow, combine it with another chapter. I had revised both chapters several times, and they seemed fine. But fine doesn’t equate to interesting, exciting, or worth… Read more »

After years of using Scrivener, I’m finally looking up how to do certain things—like change the paragraph formatting within the editor windows. Turns out it’s easy to set the default… Read more »

Because our daughter was in Paris, we visited her two and a half weeks the end of December, beginning of January. I’d just finished the third novel in my French… Read more »

My goal for NaNoWriMo this year was to finish the first draft of book three in my French series and to write at least 50,000 words. Additionally, I wanted to… Read more »

My life has a lot of writing lately, which is great. But it does make it difficult to crank out five or six thousands words a day like I used… Read more »

I started writing the first draft of French Consequences, book three in my French series. I had planned on starting early on October 1st, but with all the writing I’m… Read more »

This will be my tenth year of doing NaNoWriMo, the month-long frenzy of writing a first draft that officially requires writing 50,000 words on a new novel. I’ve always had… Read more »

Friday was a PBDD-intensive day (Partners Bridging the Digital Divide – a nonprofit where I’m the Vice-president of communications.) It makes me realize I’m juggling three different types of writing… Read more »

I don’t know how other authors of series do it, but at the moment I’m working on three books in a series at once. It started when my book discussion… Read more »

My writing group has started a path based on the Writing Excuses podcast exercises for the year. The first exercise was coming up with five story ideas based on: a… Read more »

I’m leading an Editing Path for my writing group for the month of February, and the weather decided to cooperate. There’s something about editing, shoveling snow, editing, shoveling snow in… Read more »

Today I found three things to change in the first chapter of Sticky Note Empire. Two were improvements that the book could have managed without (but are better with the… Read more »

I finished the first draft of my novel at 94,040 words on the 29th of November, with another ten hours of driving time before we got home. It’s been a… Read more »

A critiquer wondered what I was doing with the minor characters in Overbooked? I think I’ll have short stories for some, and others may be entire novels. Neat idea to… Read more »

My major writing goal for 2014 is to release two novels. Since Create Space offers two free copies for winning NaNo, I really wanted to do at least one of… Read more »

I was thinking of outlining two novels for NaNoWriMo this year since I wanted to write about Lisbon, which I think may fit into my French series. But I also… Read more »

I’ve thought for years that it would be fun to do writing/editing in a European city. Because I won’t just be a tourist all day—I’ll see some stuff, but I’ll… Read more »

I’m working on the final edits for French Impression, and as always, I struggle with the back of the book blurb. I dislike ones that give away too much of… Read more »

I proposed to my writing group a 6 Week Editing Path which requires people to commit to ‘getting together’ either virtually or in person with one or two other people… Read more »

Now that NaNoWriMo is done, I return to my true love–editing. While it’s fun to see a story idea turn into reality, it’s only the beginning. Taking that first draft… Read more »

I think I’m doing pretty good at not writing too much–too much being so much that I cause pain in my body like I did last year. I said my… Read more »

My outline for November is coming along very nicely. With a couple more passes on the second part, I might be close to done. Of course I can always work… Read more »

Nothing like working on a story where a woman is trying to cope with life after losing her husband to make me appreciate that my husband is upstairs sleeping. Our… Read more »

I’ve found that I can do a lot of final polishing via my Kindle, which means I can do it at the forest preserve while walking (I can walk and… Read more »

One problem with cutting things during revision is that with lines gone, what is left sometimes doesn’t flow as smoothly as it used to. Or two words are used too… Read more »