Publishing Options

We live in an author’s world. It used to be that authors were dependent on publishers for getting their work out into the world and getting paid for their labors. Publishers were the ones with all the power and authors were completely at their mercy. An author, if they were lucky enough to even have their work accepted, had little choice but to agree to editing changes to their book, and new…

View On WordPress

Your Link to the World

I think it’s rather fitting that when you first create a website, the default message is “Hello, World!” I’ve had a website since 2012. It started out very basic with just a list of my books and my bio. It’s slowly grown since then. First with blogging (started in 2016), then with my business, Anessa Books, and slowly I added more and more pages. At the same time that I began blogging, I got my…

View On WordPress

What's in a Name? More than you would think.

We’ve been having an interesting conversation on the Regency Fiction Writer’s Forum. It began when one member pointed us to a fascinating post on Tumblr by “Ye Olde News,” a self-described “bored researcher.” He (she?) pointed out that 62% of all women had one of five names in early 19ᵗʰ century London—Mary, Elizabeth, Sarah, Ann, and Jane. To get close to that percentage of the population today…

View On WordPress

Finding a Good Editor

One of the most important things a novelist must do-especially if they self-publish is find a good editor. But how do you know where to find one and how do you know if they’re good? When you begin looking for an editor, you need to know what sort of editing you need. Do you want someone to check your writing craft: point of view, character development, and story structure? Then you need either a…

View On WordPress

The Importance of your character's wound

Photo by Saeed Karimi, Unsplash I’m certain you learned in English class that all characters must have a flaw. This is what stops them from attaining their goal. It’s what gets in the way of their relationships. But where does that flaw come from? It comes from the character’s wound. I know I’ve discussed wounds on this blog before, but just a quick recap: A wound is something that happened in…

View On WordPress

I came across the word "swaggereth" in a book from 1622 last night and felt like it should be shared with the world.

"Hee swaggereth, as though the whole Towne were his owne."

(source: Adagia in Latine and English, Erasmus, 1622.)

Say What? Part 2

This is a continuation of the article I wrote last week. You can read it here. In this post I’ll talk about: to show conflict, (show vs. tell) to impart information to the reader succinctly, to make the reader a part of the action. Determine the pacing of the story To show conflict Whenever a writer has a story that is flat and dull, it can be fixed with conflict. Conflict in dialogue is one…

View On WordPress

Say What? Writing Dialogue

Dialogue is an essential tool of the novelist, but too many either don’t know how to write it or may not understand all that well written dialogue can do for their story. This is going to be a two-part blog post because there is just that much to say about the topic. Dialogue is used by writers to: advance the plot, to develop character Advancing the plot The most obvious use of dialogue in a…

View On WordPress

Don't let this get in your reader's way

When my great-grandfather emigrated from Ukraine to the United States in the mid-19th century, he did so on a set of papers with someone else’s name on them—a name my family still has today. Those same papers went right back to his little village in Ukraine and the following year his younger brother used the same papers to join my great-grandfather in Philadelphia, where he’d settled and was…

View On WordPress

Should you write before you write?

Writing before you write? Why? The obvious answer is to get your thoughts together, but there are other reasons as well. Here are five you might want to consider: Whether you’re a pantser or plotter, we all need to rally our thoughts. We’re human; our thought tend to fly in a hundred different directions at once. Even as I’m writing this, I’m thinking about my book which released yesterday, the…

View On WordPress

Are you having fun yet?

How do you feel when you’re heading to work? Are you excited? Are you anxious? Are you looking forward to it or dreading it? Everyday when I head into my office to start my work day I can’t wait to get going. I make a list of all that I need to do that day, prioritize them, and get started. I put all the most dull work first to be sure that I get that done. But I’m itching to getting back to my…

View On WordPress

Cheat: Get to know your characters faster

If you’re a pantser, you probably start out writing your story with a vague idea of some characters—the protagonist, a secondary character or two, and maybe the antagonist. You know, sort of what happens in the story, or maybe you don’t. Maybe you just know that there are these people waiting at the edge of your mind to come to life through your fingertips. But how do you bring them to life? How…

View On WordPress

Reviving an old book

If you’ve been publishing for a while, it’s possible that you’ve got some old, backlist books that could use an update. But how do you go about doing it and what should you consider when you face this task? I’ve recently been re-reading one of the first books I published. It was originally published with a New York publisher (do remember those old Zebra Regency Romances? This was one of them).…

View On WordPress

Why not omniscient voice?

I’ve been working with an author who has written a “self-help novel”. Basically, he wants readers to come away having learned a lesson after reading his fictional book. Fiction with a moral? Whatever you want to call it, he’s a new author (this is his first book) and he thought to make it more immediate to the reader by writing the first two sections of the book in the first person, present tense…

View On WordPress

You Deserve a Break

We have all be hearing for years about the importance of taking breaks throughout the workday. There are dozens of apps to “help” you do so from timers to focus sessions to just plain-old turning off all notifications. We are told to take a break every 20 minutes or so of work or five times a day or in between meetings. And, of course, there are all the health benefits of not sitting for so many…

View On WordPress

The POS

It has been said (I thought by Nora Roberts, but I recently saw it attributed to another author) that you can’t edit a blank page. In other words, sit down and start writing the damned story! If you’re a plotter like me, you might be tempted to not only plot the major turning points of your story, but every single scene. You might feel compelled to not only fill out your favorite character…

View On WordPress

A Different Sort of Meditation for Authors

It’s unlikely that you haven’t heard of the benefits of meditation. There are gurus and coaches of all sorts touting its benefits: it calms, it promotes focus, it clears your mind for creativity, etc, etc. That is all true, but just how do you meditate—especially when you’ve got a very active writer’s mind? One way is to forget all this nonsense about clearing your mind, and, I’m sorry, this…

View On WordPress