Today I am making my first pass through my story cards. The goal is to review the main and each sub storyline, match them against the character arcs I just finished, and use that information to help me decide which scenes are fine as is, which ones I need to beef up or trim down, and which I need to delete in service of the story. Before I got my […]
If you read my earlier post, you know I’m in the final stages of the novel, and have a deadline to be finished and ready to pitch the book by August 5th. To keep me motivated (and you informed), I will be chronicling my progress and learnings here. PROBLEM: Draft 1 of Chameleon is fairly plot centric, but there’s the potential to elevate the book and add another level of […]
This week, I made the decision to pitch my thriller novel to agents at the upcoming Willamette Writers Conference in Portland, Oregon. For any other writers out there who don’t know about this conference or the group who puts it on, Willamette Writers has been around since 1965, and this year’s conference is its 42nd. That’s right. 42nd. The group puts on a great conference across a wide range of […]
Yes. Zombies and the CDC. Best of all, I did not make this up. The local police Facebook page posted an article written by the CDC talking about how to prepare for the coming zombie apocalypse. So you, too, can be prepared, here’s the article. http://emergency.cdc.gov/socialmedia/zombies_blog.asp Happy writing.
Today is the birthday of my first sister-in-law, JL. She’s the wife of a career soldier, my oldest brother, and one of the strongest women I know. As a soldier’s wife, she knows the worry of waiting while her husband goes on deployment, of carrying on like normal for their three boys, and facing every challenge. One year, that meant sitting in a closet with her children, listening to the […]
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