We live in a web of ideas, a fabric of our own making. ~Joseph Chilton Pearce I’m editing my latest story right now. While I was writing this story that won’t be published until next September 2017, I sometimes felt as though I was having to dredge up every word. I wasn’t sure any word I was finding was a …
Sneak Peek at Love Comes Home
I usually hold off on putting the cover of my books out here on the net until closer to time for them to actually be on the shelf, but I’m giving you a sneak peek at Love Comes Home since I’ve been working on edits for it all week. The release date isn’t until summer, July 1, 2014 to be exact. …
Winners, Bicycles and Birthdays
My birthday month is over. September has slipped away too soon. No more birthday stories in my e-mail box. 🙁 It’s been a crazy month down here on the farm with Christmas at Harmony Hill out in September and Orchard of Hope coming out in its new package on October 1. Add in one of Mom’s caretakers being sidelined with cataract …
Christmas in April, New Book Covers, and Pet Words
Happy Monday morning! I’m late with this post because I was out of town yesterday. So to make up for it, let’s be early and talk about Christmas. I got the galleys on my Shaker Christmas book last week. So I’m going to have to invite the snow and chill winter winds into my imagination for a few days as …
Editing Down to the Interesting Bits
“I’m a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.” Sarah Vowell > I finished up the editing on the galleys of my Rosey Corner book, Small Town Girl, that will be released in July. Publishing a book with a traditional publisher is often a slow and exacting process. I know there are ways now that a …
A Different Kind of Whittling
The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile. __ Robert Cormier Last time here on my journal I talked about whittling – the real kind of whittling where you take …
Editing – Then and Now
My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight. ~ Maya Lin That’s what I’m doing now with my current work in progress – editing. If, as a writer, I work hard enough then the …
One Last Chance to Make It Right
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that …
Editing The Gifted
What do you think of Jessamine here? I don’t often let my heroines have blonde hair. Mostly I want them to have dark hair or auburn hair. It goes back to when I was a kid and everybody was always talking about how cute the blue-eyed, blonde girls were. Me, I wasn’t blonde. Me, I had eyes that couldn’t make …
Last Chance to Make It Right
“I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence…. In the afternoon I put it back again.”– Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) Last week I got the pages of my book, Words Spoken True, scheduled for release in February. That’s what’s in the photo along with a list of …