Yesterday, as I sat down to write some brilliant words in my WIP, I did what any writer does before starting. I got onto Facebook. For research. I swear. Okay, maybe not, but I did see a couple of posts that inspired the words you’re reading now, so it wasn’t all a waste of time.…
There’s an interesting phenomenon in the blogospere and in social media. It looks something like this: “I’m sorry I haven’t posted in a while.” “I’m sorry for posting so often.” “I apologize for the political post.” “Sorry for all the book posts.” And on and on and on. I noticed the first example in blogs…
Yesterday, I read a well-known book with my first-grade group called Is Your Mama a Llama? It’s about a llama looking for others like him, who would have a llama for a mama, told in a fun and predictable rhyming pattern. “Is your mama a llama?” I asked my fried Dave. “No she is not,” is…
Can a writer plagiarize their own work? Because I kinda managed to do that. It wasn’t a whole story or a premise or a character. It was a short setting description. I knew the moment I wrote it in my current work-in-progress that I’d written it before. It was a favorite line. Seeing as I…
Originally posted on Allison Maruska:
If you dig into a writing group, you’ll likely discover two camps: short story writers and novelists. Short story writers specialize in a greater number of short pieces of fiction (let’s say up to 10,000 words), while novelists spend their time writing fewer long works (an “average” adult novel is…
Book blogger and fellow author Colleen Chesebro has read and reviewed Drake’s story, and I’m blown away by her thorough feedback. Here’s a bit of it: I love YA fiction and strong characters because I think these portrayals give hope to our teens in a chaotic world. Fictional heroes have a way of letting kids…
The title is a question I get asked fairly often, and after writing out what I’m about to write out here several times I said to myself, “Self, you know that blog thingy we have? Maybe write it all there and then share the link when someone asks.” Myself can be pretty smart sometimes. It’s…
A few days ago on Facebook, a writer in one of the writing groups I’m in posted a question about a minority character in her book. My first thought was why would anyone be offended by the mere presence of a Chinese character? So I opened up the comments. And, well… Let’s just say diversity in…
Learning to read is a magical process: we recognize letters and assign them sounds and then smash the sounds together into words. Then we read many words in sentences and in paragraphs, not only decoding the them but extracting meaning from them. It’s pretty trippy if you dwell on it too long. Seeing as learning…
Originally posted on Allison Maruska:
Last week, I participated in a flash fiction challenge in which I picked two subgenres to mash together into a single short story. I did this using a random number generator and landed on dystopia and erotica. (Read it here if you’re so inclined.) Yep, erotica. As in hormones, blood…
Allison Maruska 