Some days are harder than others. This morning the alarm went off and I groaned. I can’t face today. I just want to sleep forever. But instead I roll over and shuffle to the bathroom. I brush my teeth in a Monday morning fog and sit down at my computer with a sense of dread. But I am here. I… Read more »
My most productive writing month ever was July 2014. My boyfriend was on deployment, and I was unemployed. It was basically a glimpse of what life could be like as a full-time writer, and it was awesome—I wrote 24,172 words! (Okay, boyfriend being gone sucked, but it did make for a lot of free time.) It was no surprise that my productivity tapered… Read more »
Welcome back! No, not to you, to me! It’s been a little bit since I’ve blogged. I make no apology, since it was an entirely planned absence on my part. My boyfriend returned from his extended deployment two months ago, and I wanted to spend time focusing on reintegrating him into my life and processing the general change and upheaval… Read more »
So as I recently finished up novel 7, I’ve been getting into the exciting/nerve-wracking stage of submitting it! Oh, the joys of querying. Anyway, I’ve had zero success in two contests now and so far no positive responses from the first batch of queries. It’s enough to make a writer want to crawl into a hole and say “Sorry for… Read more »
Okay, maybe a Nora novel isn’t an officially recognized category—yet! In any case, I have a pretty methodical way that I go about writing a novel, refined over several manuscripts. So I thought I would share that method in case it is helpful and/or interesting for anyone else! The video describes it pretty well, but I thought I would also… Read more »
I want to take a break from navel-gazing (an occupational hazard, I swear) to offer something a little more concrete and useful. There are a million tools for writers out there. For the most part, I ignore them. People chatter about Scrivener, but I plug away at my drafts in Word, crafting Excel spreadsheets that lay out detailed plans… Read more »
Well, well, well, 2015. Here we are. Together at last–or already? It’s hard to say for sure, because on the one hand, holy shit it’s 2015. But on the other, 2014 was eons long! It was definitely a big year for me, both in terms of my personal life and my writing. In February, I applied for the… Read more »
Happy Friday, folks! Hopefully many of you will get a chance to take a little break in the upcoming weeks. (I am using all of my PTO to take two days off so I can go back to Iowa! I think I must be crazy.) In any case, #FFF will be on a little break, but will be back in… Read more »
Okay, I’m not saying that this is going to be a regular thing, but I kinda had fun doing Throwback Thursday last week. So I decided to dig back into my archives for a prose sample. I like to see how far I’ve come over the past 14 years! Because, yes, this excerpt is from my very first novel that… Read more »
Sitting down to write a blog post today, I had to blink at my screen and figure out what I wanted to write. Not because I didn’t have anything to say—on the contrary, I feel like I have too much! First, there’s a list of “Blog Post Ideas” on my Todoist for those times that I can’t come up with… Read more »