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These are a few of my favorite things…
Since I (accidentally) missed last month’s FM MGR Blog post, I figured I better make this a good one , which is rather tough given the topic. This is also my last FM MGR blog post as I’ve decided to do something different for 2014. Today is also Christmas – so Merry Christmas to all who celebrate. For everyone else,…
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Pinning Down Inspiration
One of my favorite writing quotes of all time: “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” — Jack London To me it embodies all that it means to be a professional writer. Only hobby writers have time to sit around waiting for inspiration and lament about writer’s block. Those who do it for…
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Thank Gods for the Interwebs
I remember being back in college. Research papers were always a pain. Research meant long hours sitting the library sifting through the card catalog and pulling books from shelves. It meant hours reading and taking notes. Nowadays the Internet has made research simple. One only has to go as far as her computer to find the information she seeks. With…
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Cultivating Motivation
So when I began writing this post I actually felt rather unmotivated to write about motivation. Motivation can be a fickle thing. Because, you see, when it occurred to me that I wasn’t motivated to write about motivation, I found it so amusing that it motivated me to write about motivation. That’s how motivation sometimes works. At first I began…
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Find the Right Community
Online writing communities can be vast oceans difficult to navigate if you’re new to the scene. The wrong community can cause aspiring writers to give up, while the right community can help nurture a writer’s creativity, or boost them toward publication. The first question you want to ask yourself is, “What are my long term goals?” If you love writing…
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Character Sketch: Leon
Character Sketch: Leon Rodrigues (Rising Darkness, OTS #3) This month we were supposed to either discuss our favorite character or draw up a character sketch, so I chose the latter. Mostly because I wanted to explore what kind of person this character was when he was alive, and how that translates to him as a character now that he’s dead.…
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Progress
We had two choices for this month’s Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour topic. We could discuss current projects or progress. Since I already posted a current projects post just a week or so ago, progress it is! Progress, for me, is a crap-shoot. It really depends on how the story is flowing on any given day. Sometimes I need more time to mull…
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Writing Routines
It appears many of the writers who covered this top this month are just as haphazard as me. Discipline is one of those things I still struggle with and work at. I may spend an entire writing day and only get 1K out, but then on a day I’m working the day job, I’ll end up pushing out over 3K…
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A Malkuth of Me, business of writing, craft, Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour, NaNoWriMo, novels, the writing life
Breaking the Block
One of the most common questions I get is how to break writer’s block. I suppose I get this question a lot because I’m one of those writers who’s rather prolific. My other writer friends watch me produce book after book and wonder how the heck I do it. Truthfully, I wasn’t always this way. I labored over my first novel…
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Firsts
I remember when I made my first semi-pro short story sale. It was A Sorcerer By Any Other Name and I sold it to a small zine called Sorcerous Magazine back in 1996. I later sold the same story to Alexandria Digital Literature. That seems to be how it goes with my short fiction. It always ends up a reprint…