Blog About Kickass Worth-Your-Time Blogs

UncommonYA

A great blog by a fierce collection of kickass YA authors. They're all superchics. Bookmark it. You won't be sorry. Unless you don't...and then you'll be all like, "Ah, I wish I would've followed that link to UncommonYA on Addicted to Words. But I didn't and now I'm nothing. Nothing!" Okay, so it won't be as bad as all that. But it's definitely going to suck. So, do it! Click!

YA Bound

Is the place to be if you want boundless YA books to devour. No page left unturned here. From author interviews and book reviews to dressing up like your favorite literature, this blog's got it all! Make sure you give it a wink and nod and tell 'em Addicted to Words sent you.

The Midnight Garden

Can everyone say, "Oooh! Aaaah!" This blog is so pretty I want to curl up inside it and bask in its glorious-ness (beware, I make up words). Fantastically fun and fulfilling, you'll fall hopelessly in love, just as I have, with the reviews and giveways.

KelsNotChels Not Live

One word. Funny! Kels cracks me the eff up! She's got some straight forward and valid advice for pre-published authors like us, and she's funny too. I met this gal at Dallas Fort Worth Writer's Conference 2014 but I've followed her vlog for years longer. She's awesome. Go see for yourself. 



All righty, gibber typers. That's it for today. Know a fantastic YA-ish blog? Leave a link in the comments and I'll check it out. <3

The Writer’s Maze: WiPs and Chains

No, I’m not talking about 50 Shades in this episode! Although, that could be fun…

No! No. Get your head out of the clouds and get back to work.

For this installment of The Writer’s Maze I want to talk about our WiPs (for those of you who don’t know, these are not long leather straps that writer’s hit each other with. They’re our ideas, our babies, our Works in Progress). I have about a million of these lyin’ about on various computers and thumb drives. And here’s where we’ll start this maze…

The beginning.

Those very first intimate moments, between writer and a new idea, are glorious. It’s like new love…only better. Because in that first instance when a new idea strikes you think, “Well, that’s it! I am brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. That idea is just so freaking clever, no way anyone’s ever thought of it before.” You walk around in a cloud, putting the milk in the cupboard and the toaster in the fridge, because your left brain is so engaged in the creative juices that you can’t possibly function in the real world. You scribble notes on everything, including the chalkboard on the fridge, the grocery list in your purse, your child’s drawing, until you finally have to begin the outline.

The outline.

Ugh. The outline is where the euphoria starts to wane, but you still think your idea is epic and fresh. You ignore the nagging voice that pipes up saying, “That’s not going to work,” and you fight to keep the initial adrenaline alive. Because you remember what the beginning felt like. And then you wonder, after scrounging all of your scattered notes, what am I forgetting? Was this my original idea? Where is the brilliance?

The middle.

And this is where the chains begin to cinch around your wrists, holding your fingers on the keyboard in stubborn bondage as you kick, scream and cry to make that first idea a reality of literary perfection (NOTE: If you’re chasing literary perfection, give up now, it doesn’t exist). The middle of this maze is the development, the exposition of characters and plot. The setting and world building (because you ignore the giant gaping holes you discovered in your outline phase) where you catch small glimpses of your beginning genius. Your characters might be sound, your dialog intriguing, your sentence structure purple and flowing, but you haven’t yet admitted to yourself that none of these things will matter once you enter the next tunnel of the maze.

The story arc.

And here’s where we grab the eraser and smudge out the notes still glaring at us from the chalkboard on the refrigerator. Once we have grown attached to our protagonist and antagonist and we’re invested in their lives, we realize that our plot and/or subplot don’t really work. There’s no way event A would lead to event B, at least not believably. But, if you’re like me, you tell yourself, “That’s a bunch of crap. Believability comes from good writing. I just have to write it better.” So, on you trudge (ignoring the little voice calling you a fool), peppering your WiP with eloquent prose and vivid details. Though, even your characters are trying to tell you it’s not working.

The ending.

And when you finally reach the page where you get to write THE END, you only feel empty. “I’ll fix it in revision,” you tell the computer screen. But the roiling pit in your stomach begs you to just junk the entire manuscript and save yourself the months of head-banging frustration that is sure to come with plot holes the size of the Hoover Dam. In the end, whether the manuscript is good or bad, you set it aside (because this is the best advice, honest) and put it out of your head for a month or two (or longer depending on if you’ve moved on to your next WiP or not).

Revision.

This is a very long (for some, not for all) process, because in this portion of the maze you find conflicting directions and can actually find yourself roaming around in circles with no idea of how to get through. In the revision phase you tweak and fuss, cleaning up every little corner, but no matter how much you sweep away the garbage and fluff up the grit, you still seem to find something else that could be improved. It never ends. But BEWARE you can tweak too much and do more damage than good. The best idea is to revise with intent.

Revising with intent.

·         Allow yourself a set number of revisions before you send the WiP to critique partners and beta readers. I do about 3 revisions for this phase.

·         One, big picture layout. Does the story follow the formula for that genre? Is the story pacing right for that genre? Is the story following the arc, or does it meander off track (my nemesis)?

·         Two, authenticity of character and dialog. World building. Is it all believable?

·         Three, tidy up grammar and messy tidbits left over from previous revisions.

Now, send it off to someone else. This is, perhaps, the most important part of the writing process. The part where you, the writer, do nothing but chew your fingernails off while you wait – stalking your inbox hourly – to hear what your trusted friends and allies thought of your “brilliance.” Again, I must warn you. DO NOT OVERTHINK this. You want your crit partners to rip it apart, of course we all hope they don’t need to, but the reality is that if they don’t they’re probably not being honest (in which case you need new crit partners). Yes, you want to know if your WiP has potential and yes you want to know that your idea – the one that got you jazzed enough to write it in the first place – is solid and worth continuing the revision process. If you get the go-head once your baby comes home, you’re good to begin revising from their notes. And here is my advice on that.

·         DO NOT (under any – okay, most – circumstances) GET OFFENDED. These are the thoughts and honest opinions of people who took the time to read your work (and at this stage it isn’t always easy to get through someone else’s unfinished work) and make detailed suggestions. They are not trying to hurt your feelings or insult you. They are trying to help you find the spots in your WiP that could be stronger. That is all. The best way is to read the comments with an open mind and then walk away. DO NOT go right into revision. Let the comments sink in first, let that knee-jerk reaction settle, and then come back to tackle the process of fixing problems areas.

What to do when you get multiple suggestions. This is inevitable and difficult to navigate. Once you’ve sent your WiP to a handful of people, you’re going to get a bucket-load of conflicting advice back. Some people are going to like your writing just as it is. Here’s where you get to take creative control. That time you took to absorb all of the advice, that’s going to work in your favor here. Now you get to chose, either you’ll decide that first person (the one who insulted your ego) was right, or you can snub your nose at them and ignore their advice. This is entirely up to you. I will tell you though, that some of my best writing has come out of the changes I’ve made to a WiP that I was resistant to. Chose carefully. Don't chain yourself to only one possibility, you might find greatness if you cut the old idea loose.

And now you’ve done it. Congratulations, you’ve clawed your way through this phase of the Writer’s Maze.
The maze continues here: The Writer's Maze: What a Zoo!

Ordinary Woman Wants to Write Amazing Things

Over that last few years I’ve dabbled in revealing my hidden secrets, too afraid to really open up and let the world see who I am.

I want to be a writer, people won’t read my books if they know the real me, I told myself.

But I’ve learned something recently (we’re never too old to learn), I’m not writing books to hide my past, I’m writing books to reveal it. My past is the whole reason I’m writing at all. Let me begin at the beginning…

I was born in Rockledge Florida in 1967. Influenced from birth by my father, the rocket scientist, I toddled the halls of NASA mesmerized by the rooms of giant, chugging and blinking computers and fell in love with all things science and science fiction. It was the height of the space-race and watching rockets blast off for the moon was a regular event in my family. 

Growing up on Merritt Island with a deeply religious mother and an agnostic father who’d been raised with a witch doctor as a nanny in the Bahamas, my world was full of unimaginable intrigue. Like a sponge I listened, though I didn’t speak until I was almost three, I understood all that was happening around me. 

 Star Trek and Star Wars were my first big concepts in the world of make-believe, not the usual fairytale, but I wanted to climb aboard a spaceship more than any princess wanted a glass slipper or a house full of dwarfs. It wasn’t until Harry Potter came along and shook this magical fantasy in my face that I began to imagine a world where all things belonged, magic, science, science fiction and religion. The possibilities were boundless to me. I truly believed that science and time would lend themselves nicely to the world of make-believe and verify that magic might truly be possible one day. 

 That magic seemed out of reach when I struggled in school. Learning disabilities were many times undiagnosed or untreated in those days and no one realized that I was dyslexic for years. At which time I had already been held back a grade and called lazy, stupid, and even slapped by a teacher for misspelling my last name on a spelling test.

 My childhood dreams had become a nightmare until the day I overheard my mother telling my father that she’d read about some research on, “something called dyslexia.” It was then that light found its way to me again, my mother bought me “read along” records (big black discs made of vinyl which spun around a turntable and played music) of Winnie the Pooh. After, that I laid on our red-shag carpet for hours listening (I was good at that) and memorizing the shape of each individual word. Once my mother proved to the school that the “treatment” was working, they set me up with a program called SR8 and four years later, high school now, I could read at a sixth grade reading level.

It was a long road with many bumps and bruises along the path. I dropped out of high school in the ninth grade because I was swallowed up and forgotten. By sixteen I was emancipated because my parents were in the middle of a nasty divorce and just before my seventeenth birthday I found myself alone and pregnant. 

Too broke for cable television I turned to books and their authors quickly became my best friends. Although it was slow, and sometimes painful, I learned to read and read well. By the time my son entered school I’d married and added a couple more children to my brood, but we were still too broke for things like books (which my then husband deemed a non-necessity – two guesses as to why he’s my ex), so I wrote stories for my children, lovingly illustrated with markers, colored pencils and crayons (I still have a couple).  

Today, at 47 years young, I’m a happily remarried military wife, mother and grandmother. I have seven children in all, five of whom are grown, and two toddlers (my sweet husband I adopted my eldest son’s babies two and a half years ago when he was unable to care for them).

Currently I reside in Florida after living much of my life in the Pacific Northwest (through no fault of my own – no offense Seattle but you’re just so gray). Thanks to the military we found ourselves in Georgia five years ago, where we both fell in love with the south. Now I’m finally home, back in the warmth of the sunshine state and once again dreaming of a universe overflowing with possibilities. 

I began writing for a small newspaper in Oregon in 2009 and since then I’ve completed seven novels and a small horde of outlines for future projects. I am in the process of completing my BA in Creative Writing and I hope to one day soon be able to share my work with those who share my love of all things strange and to empower women of all ages to find their superpower.  

So, that’s my story. Now what’s yours? Feel free to share with me in the comments, send me a friend request on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter. I’m here for you.

Want to do more? Check these amazing women out and get inspired…

Write Girl 

Difference in the World 

Maggie Stiefvater

Jacqueline Woodson