Cynnara Tregarth

Recovering from this surgery is like being a pro athlete. You seem to heal fast, but what you don’t understand until you start back on the normal daily activities is that you have no stamina. None. Zilch.

Why? I think it has something to do with healing and that your body is trying its best to get you through the workday. Every night for the past three weeks, I’ve been ready for bed at 8pm. That’s not me normally. I’m usually the 11pm bedtime baby. However, with trying to get back to walking 2-3 miles a day during regular activities and walking my husky, I’m discovering that my remarkably fast recovery hid a darker side– that of exhaustion.

I spend every day tired. I’ve been writing in long hand because I can’t get the energy up to sit more than 20 minutes before I’m ready to fall asleep. I’ve been struggling to even keep up at my games– if that tells you anything! *gasp*

But I am making progress. I’m closing in on the last 10k of Pirate Queen’s Conquest and honestly, it looks better than it did when I started the story. I’m reworking Beg into World Series of Love: Beg– and I’m really proud of it! Plus, I’m finding a story for Changeling I had hiding in my long lost stories and I’m wondering with a bit of twisting and changing, if possible I can get it done sooner than later. I’m just saying.

So what are you doing that’s pushing the envelope this summer? Me? I’m trying to get walking one mile without stopping and without my feet trying to kill me in the process. I’m also trying to get writing 4 days a week at least 3 pages each day. It’s something with my ADD I need to strive for and I’ve decided that today was day one of buckling down on it. I worked on my nonfiction book today because I needed it– and I hand wrote 5 pages. Go me!

One of my writing buddies gave me the URL to a fantastic article dealing with editing and how professional writers should handle edits. It’s snarky, it’s fun and most importantly, it’s a good reminder to get things done when you’re supposed to. It’s definitely going to be bookmarked for future reference just to keep my hate of editing at a minimum. My reason for not liking editing isn’t because I think I’m better than that- it’s because I’m usually in a new story and I don’t wanna go back to a story that I know so well already. To my mind it’s done and over with. *sigh* But this, might just keep me laughing through edits.

Bleeding Red Ink by Lesli Richardson

Blurbs–they can get people reading or they can make people pass on by. Yes, many will tell you that cover alone is the be all, end all of your book hooking readers, but many of us are drawn more to titles and blurbs over covers. Even if you have the most kick-ass cover–without a blurb snaring the attention–you can still lose readers. So, how do you write a blurb that hooks your attention without giving too much away? More »

What are the basic components of a good story?

Many authors and writers have different ideas on this. I make reference to Vogler’s The Character’s Journey and Morgan Hawke’s Cheater’s Guide to Erotic Romance Novellas.

Depending on if you’re writing a one or two main character story, that will decide how long and what kind of components you’ll have. More »

      Fiction writing is an expression of our wants, needs and a reflection of society – past, present, future. Many people say they have great story ideas, they just don’t have the time to write them. Most failed fiction writers fall into this category. But you want to be different – not only do you want to write – you want to be published. For this article, I talked with some of my author friends and editors for their suggestions as well. Luckily, Nikita Gordyn offered some suggestions and wrote them down for me, instead of having me remember them. LOL More »