by Ane Mulligan My latest WIP is either going to kill me or be my opus. My main character did not reveal as much as I prefer before I started writing the story. I knew her home was steeped in secrets; I knew those. Or so I thought. But she withheld a few to spring on me at unsuspected times. …
What Is Your Hero Pursuing?
by Henry McLaughlin We’ve all heard story is about conflict and tension. And that is definitely true. Stories about happy people living in Happy Valley don’t excite readers. Frankly, they can be boring. The story becomes a story when something disrupts the status quo. As John LeCarré once said, “The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The …
The Reading/Writing Sisterhood
by Marianne Evans Today’s post is a shout-out to the Internet, and the power of social media to bring people together from all walks of life, all locations, and create a blessing. Yes, the advent of cyber-communication is a paradox—the best of things, the worst of things—but I’m fresh from the cobbled streets of historic Deadwood, South Dakota and a …
Put Your Heart in a Book
By Jodie Wolfe These are the types of reviews we long for as authors: I couldn’t put it down, and ended up starting and finishing the book in a few hours! … created characters that grabbed my attention and my heart right from the start. Never a dull moment in this story from beginning to end. … has a flair …
Keeping On Keeping On
By Donna L.H. Smith Isaiah 40:31 says, “They that wait upon the LORD, shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not grow weary. They shall walk and not faint.” Currently, we need to rely on God and persevere in order to improve our craft and our chances of getting published. We …
Resolving Tension
By Sarah Hamaker As writers, we work with tension all the time—without tension, our stories would sag and our heroes and heroines would have very boring relationships. But this blog is about the tension we experience between what we want to work on and what we have to work on. For many of us, writing is not our fulltime job. …
Naysayers In Your Life? One Way to Deal With Them
By Patricia Bradley Today Justice Betrayed, my seventh book with Revell (9 books altogether) releases, and I’m super excited. It’s my “Elvis” book. I mean, you can’t write about Memphis and not have an Elvis book! It also has scenes set in Elmwood Cemetery, the oldest active cemetery in Memphis. Oldest, active cemetery. There’s just something about those words that …
What’s Your Season?
By Kathy Parish My birthday is May 29th. I’ll not mention the year of my birth, but be assured that for all of those Facebook posts about “Share if you remember this” or “Do you know what this is?” I can answer affirmatively. (I don’t share, though. After all, who needs to know that I remember days pre-microwave and DVD …
Defining
By Christine Sunderland Writing a novel of ideas is not for the faint of heart. In the writing of my novel-in-progress, Angel Mountain, I find that I have too many stories to tell. The files containing what I don’t use are far fatter than the wee little file containing what I end up using. How does a writer abandon some …
The Miracle of Hope
By Catherine West Today I’m celebrating the release of my sixth novel! My third published book through Harper Collins Christian Publishing, and since the title is Where Hope Begins, I thought hope would be the perfect topic for today’s post. “Hope begins in the dark. The stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right …