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7 Things Your Writer Needs to Hear
Hi! Colonel Shifty here, reporting with another list of tips for the people who care for writers. Maybe your writer is shy, or passive aggressive, or just so darn busy drafting Book 3 in her series...
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7 Things Your Support Network Needs to Hear
It’s me, Colonel Shifty again! (You lucky ducks.) Last week I counseled Support Network Personnel in the things their writers need to hear. This week, the message is for writers. What does your Support...
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Friday Five, I’m Still Alive
1. I wish I could blame my bloggy-slackiness on a crashing laptop. But that happened just yesterday, & I’ve gone a month of Fridays with no posts. So I’ll blame something else. Summer! The heat!...
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The Spider (CONTAINS PHOTOS, NOT FOR FAINT OF HEART)
First I saw this. And freaked out. Then I guessed it was an exoskeleton, & freaked out more. Then I decided to vacuum the whole house (@Izandra thought the best solution was to move and burn the...
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The Arms of the Ocean
A beautiful thing happened this week. I finished typing in my handwritten revisions for Draft 3 of my surfing novel!!!!!! Really, this is a small thing, and probably doesn’t deserve six exclamation...
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Off to Los Angeles
Okay, so now the time travel aspect of this post is even MORE confusing, because I forgot to post it. But I can’t have my gorgeous artwork NOT go up. Besides, my brain is still exploding (mostly in a...
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SCBWI Summer Conference 2013
Because I’m probably the last person to blog about the conference, this’ll be a quick-n-dirty version. For the keynotes and workshops, I took varying amounts of notes, but for each one I tried to find...
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Colonel Shifty’s Haiku Made Easy – Query Critique or Poem Giveaway
Okay, so I actually used to do this when I worked in a restaurant. On my close-out envelope, I’d write a few 5- and 7-syllable options and ask a coworker to choose and voila, a ready-made haiku....
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Friday Five
1. I made my first green smoothie yesterday, thanks to advice from my BFF K-Joy! It was a beginner’s green smoothie, with spinach, banana, and lots of blueberries. Actually quite tasty. Maverick loved...
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Some Ways to Recharge
We ALL need rest (although try telling that to my five-year-old). So I started thinking about what helps me relax and stock up on energy…here are my ideas. 1. I prepare for recharging like I’d prepare...
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A New Short Story
On Sunday, the fab team at Cast of Wonders, a young adult audio magazine, will broadcast my flash fiction story, “Come With Me,” along with two other shorts that I am really eager to hear! “Come With...
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Battle of the Protagonists
Let’s just assume it is normal for a writer to have her characters talking inside her head. I’m not saying this happens to me…okay, fine, it does. But it’s usually limited to conversations between the...
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Friday Five: Beta Bliss
1. I’m beta-reading a book that I like so much, I’m cranky I have to take time out to write this blog post at all. Seriously, the beta reads I’ve done in the past year? Really enjoyable. Friends, keep...
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And let the madness begin…
National Novel Writing Month has begun. I wrote straight through Maverick’s nap and am 63% of the way to my goal. For the day, people! Not for the month! Blog posts will be short on Fridays (or not at...
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And the beat goes on…
I’m having a blast with NaNoWriMo. The one big tragedy that I confessed to a writing friend the other day is that sometimes I write a scene that cracks me up, and I’m laughing out loud while I type it....
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if you want to destroy my sweater
While on the way home from school, Weezer’s “Sweater Song” came on the radio, and Z was intrigued. “Can you really destroy a sweater like that?” Not being a knitter, I don’t know the answer, but I said...
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the last dance
(with 2 bonus sweater-destroying illustrations!) I’ve had a blast with this blog. It began accidentally in January 2010, with this post on Two Rules of Storytelling. I wasn’t after a blog; what I...
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Pitch Wars Wishlist!
I’m breaking a looooong blog hiatus for a very good reason–Pitch Wars! Pitch Wars is one of those things I saw on Twitter all the time, and I wondered how to get involved but never really followed...
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