Author of the Small Worlds series
Have you ever read a book that hooked you completely from the very first sentence? On the recommendation of Amanda Cade, I started reading Strange the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor, and I was absolutely drawn in from the opening line - which don’t worry, I’ll share in a moment. It grabbed me from the very …
Continue reading The First Words – Some of the Best Opening Lines in Fiction
Due to some things that came up, instead of a new blog post today, I'm rerunning one from October I was particularly proud of...that also was a good reminder to myself yesterday and today with everything going on. One thing that I’ve noticed about a lot of up and coming writers is that we are …
The other night, I was talking to a few other authors in a discord channel we share. Someone linked this reddit post titled “How to make money ePublishing (without a bestseller)”. It had some really good advice in it, but that wasn’t what we talked about - we talked about one particular piece of advice …
Continue reading Pasta Sauce and Books: Should you Write to Market?
Based on the response I got to the last time I decided to look into common writing advice that is often poorly explained, I decided it would be a good idea to make this an ongoing series I come back to every now and then. So far, we’ve looked at the suggestion of “just write” …
Continue reading Write What You Know: Breaking Down Common Writing Advice
In last week’s post, I mentioned that I would spend some time talking about how to Show instead of Tell. I often mention that I’m going to do articles in the future, but this particular one received an unprecedented number of requests, so I decided to run with it. Just like last week, where I …
Continue reading See Jane Run: The Difference Between Showing and Telling
One of the first pieces of advice most writers have beaten into them is “Show don’t tell.” The reason this advice is hammered home so hard is because it is, in fact, good advice. The story is almost always better when you show something, rather than when you tell it. It immerses the reader more …
Continue reading What’s a McDonald’s? Handling Exposition when you have to Tell Instead of Show.
One of the side effects of the modern ebook era is that the term “book” has pretty much lost all meaning. A book can be virtually anything when it’s published in an ebook format, because there’s no need to worry about printing and binding and all the things that come with a physical copy. Don’t …
Continue reading How Long Should your Book be? Story Lengths Explained
