As many of you already know, I’m a firm believer in the power of networking.  As a writer, it is part of my job to not only write interesting stories, but to meet people who can help those stories get into the hands of readers.  That group of people includes publishers, editors, other writers, marketing folks, agents and, of course, the readers themselves. One thing I don’t think I’ve ever said is that the networking portion of the job is easy… or fruitful… or without stress.  I’ve never said that because it is easily the toughest thing to do.  At least it is for me. Some people have the gift of gab and can walk up to anyone and begin […]

By the time this week is over, you will probably be well and truly tired of hearing about creating characters. Isn’t it great? I personally will echo my fellow SWN’ers in saying that I love having the chance to look at and feed off of each other’s ideas.  It makes things so much easier, if not more interesting. As I’ve mentioned in the past, most of my stories are character driven.  But I’ve recently been reviewing some of my writing and I’ve discovered something:  my protagonists have a great deal of depth, but the antagonists seem to be lacking a certain something (they are mostly one-dimensional, I would say).  It became very apparent as I was reading one of my longer stories.  […]

For those of us who live in a Northern Climate, writing has just become much, much harder.  Logic would dictate that since it’s so damn cold out we SHOULD have all this time to write while we sit in front of a roaring fire drinking hot, alcohol laced drinks. All I can say is Logic is stupid; next time I meet it, I’m going to have a few choice words to share… maybe even a couple body shots. The truth of the matter is we are now in a period of time when the sun only graces us for a few hours per day.  As luck would have it, those hours are the exact same ones that correspond to my […]

Nanowrimo is almost over for another year, although it was over for me over a week ago when I finished my 50,000 words.  Despite hitting my goals it didn’t turn out quite the way I expected.  I had all these hopes of spending time with my fellow Nano’s in the form of chats, write-ins and various other mixer-type events. As it turned out, I only made it to one event the entire month (although I do expect to attend the TGIO party) and two chats.  From that perspective, Nano this year was a bust. Fortunately, the networking aspect is not the only measure of Nanowrimo for me.  I have to look closely at those things that I actually learned over the […]