I have had ‘Mystic River’ in my to-be-read pile for quite sometime.  I haven’t seen the movie but I have seen the movie for ‘Gone Baby Gone’ and thought it was great. The trailers for the movie ‘Shutter Island’ drew me in and I bought the book the other day.  Could not put it down.  [...]

At this point if you are a pantzer, you will probably start writing.  But if you are a plotter who needs a little direction, this is when you will probably need to decide whether to plot or create your characters.  Most of the how-to books suggest one or the other.  I usually do a combination [...]

It feels as if we are stuck in the middle of a horror movie, here in Iowa. A foggy mist hovers over the landscape hiding the sun.  I can’t remember the last time I noticed sunshine. The warmer temperatures and rain today did manage to melt some of the snow and thank goodness we didn’t have [...]

Here it is Friday, January 22, 2010 and I still feel like I’m in limbo.  I am still job searching.  My experience as a temp so far is – work a month, off a month. Not exactly, what I had hoped would happen.  But it is not all bad; I have been sending out resumes [...]

  Now that you’ve come up with a story idea and have had some time to play around with it, the next step is to determine your audience.  Who would read this kind of story?  Here are some of your choices: Literary isn’t really a genre but from everything I’ve read, no one has really [...]

It is my pleasure to introduce another local author I met at the Author Fair last fall in Des Moines.  The Fair was a great event and I hope to see more authors there next year.  Here’s Tricia:   Where are you from? I grew up on a farm between Emmetsburg and Graettinger, Iowa. How [...]

BRAINSTORMING, MINDMAPPING, OR PLAYING MAKE BELIEVE             Now that you have your spark of an idea for a novel, what do you do with it? This is when it starts getting fun.  There are several methods and I will share a few with you to get you started:             1. What If – This is [...]

  I have always been fascinated with the writing process.  That is one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed the author interviews on this blog.  If you have read enough of them, you will see what I mean.  They are all doing the same thing, writing novels, but they all have their own path they follow.  [...]

I am working to finish the novel I started in November.  I am revising and hope to have it completed this spring.  In the meantime, I thought it might be fun to try something in the same vein as the Write a Novel with me posts but in a slightly different format.  I love to [...]

I have never been great with resolutions so I don’t plan to make any this year.  I know what I want and I am going to go for it.  I have a mostly finished novel that I worked on for Nano but I am not foolish enough to think that it is a book.  November [...]