There’s an oft-quoted six-word story attributed to Hemingway that goes like this: For sale: baby shoes, never worn It turns out there’s no documented evidence to link this story to Hemingway, and it appears to have come from a play about his life. But it captures what we think of his style. Hemingway made a…
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People often ask me how I manage a full-time private practice, which is a job and a half, and a writing career. The answer I would want to give used to be, “not very well.” It wasn’t always that way. But in the past few years, all the tasks became too much for me to…
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A good book is filled with people we feel we’ve met. We imagine meeting them on the street, or that their name might show up in our inbox. They exist both inside the book and in an extended version of our own reality because they’ve become part of our consciousness. They think, talk, and act…
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Editing advice is depressingly easy to come by, especially when our work in progress is circling the drain. That’s when the armchair editors come out to play, usually with a sympathetic shrug and sad eyes. Then they gingerly toe our story as if it were a roadkill raccoon. Once we get past the impulse to…
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I love the steampunk genre, especially the alternate history aspect. The Art of Piracy, my story for the Rogue Skies box set, is set in the same alternate timeline as my Aether Psychics series. How can you change history to work for your own fiction? Here are some ideas. First, figure out your why. Some people…
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In theater, they call them props. Comedians can make a whole routine out of an object. In movies, the camera can foreshadow developments by focusing closely on seemingly harmless objects. Writers can use props in writing, too. Bringing in ordinary things like objects, locations, and animals to pace and direct the story can slow it…
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Being a writer is awesome. You just sit down, close your eyes, say your mantra, put fingers to keys… And floof! The words flow in a torrent of rainbows, unicorns, plot twists, and… Yeah, that’s not how it happens. Writing is hard work, especially for those of us with day jobs. I use a lot…
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Unfortunately, the income of most authors is not enough to sustain a mouse, much less a modern household in a large urban city. Without a doubt, this is the most common reason for the rise of the weekend warrior writer, who toils for pay five days a week and pounds on the keyboard during weekend…
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Many creatives in the world suffer from chronic pain issues. I’m here to help you discover new ways to fit writing into your schedule and around pain flare-ups! My Conditions I was diagnosed with severe scoliosis when I was about 11 years old. I wore a back brace until I was almost 17. I managed…
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If you’re an active writer and/or active in any online writing communities, you’ve doubtless heard other writers talk about their word counts and writing goals. And if you’re anything like me when I was just starting out and cultivating my writing habit–building that writing muscle, if you will–you’ve looked at some of those wordcounts and…
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