So now that I’ve complained about how Nanowrimo steals a month of your life away and you’d have to be CRAZY to want to sign up, another perspective, excerpted from my post over at Dailywritingtips: Kickstart Your Writing With Nanowrimo Nanowrimo teaches important writing habits that no fiction writer can afford to ignore: 1. Discipline: [...]

(This is the fifth in a weekly series about tools for writers. For the rest of the series, go here.) For fiction writers: I love the free Eclectic Writer’s Character Chart, which has spaces to fill in everything from the color of your hero’s eyes to the person he secretly admires. An HTML version is [...]

flickr:retro traveler Maps, the stylish merger of form and function, are the easiest way to impart certain types of information. Can you imagine what travel would be like if all travel directions were verbal only? Ick. Maps can help you with your writing, too. I don’t mean outlines or “mind maps” or the like, though [...]

(This is the second in an ongoing series about tools for writers. For the first post in the series, see Submission Tracker Roundup.) I have to say, my love for Roughdraft borders on the irrational. There are lots of free word processors for PC users out there, starting with WordPad. Why download another piece of [...]

Avoid cliches like the plague if you want your writing to improve. You’ve heard that before, I know, but seriously–you need another cliche-infested sentence like you need a hole in the head. I believe it was George Orwell who said that if a phrase even rings familiar, it’s a cliche. So we’re not talking about [...]

I’ve been freelancing a little since my move to DC, and it’s only served to remind me of how badly I need a way to keep my ideas, submissions, queries, and other files organized. When I used a PC I used Sonar (more on that later), but on my Mac options seem to be few [...]

I promised over a month ago to write a guide to getting your work into print. Before we start, though, a disclaimer: If you are serious about starting a writing career, there are books and web sites galore that will give you more than enough information about the process of writing query letters, the right [...]

Today I am grumpy. It seems one of the most popular search terms for sending people to my blog is “words to use instead of ‘said’.” People, why are you searching for this? What’s wrong with “said”? I have touched on this in an earlier post, but I want to reiterate. Even in more “colorful” [...]