Going On Vacation….
Hi everyone.  I am off to a wonderful, and much needed, vacation with my family.  I’ll see you back here in December.  Until then, enjoy a little of my favorite classical pieces for this time of year.  (AND BTW, go to the bottom of this post for a NON-CLASSICAL video…that is just so…random!) Have a great week. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons:  Autumn Adam Sandler’s Thanksgiving Song

Blog Chain: Making Time For It All….
Happy Friday everyone!  It’s blog chain time again.  Mandy asked: How do you prioritize? How do you balance paying attention to your writing, critiquing for friends, spending time with your family and earning a living? What a great question!  I did a blog post on this a few weeks ago.  In that post I talked about the craziness in my life

Generosity and Writers
The other day I was speaking with a non-writer friend of mine.  He asked about my current WiP and I was saying that my crit partners were busy shredding it.  That lead to a conversation about critiquing in general.  At the end of the conversation, my friend asked “So, why do you do it?  I mean, you spend hours and hours reading other people’s manuscripts – on top of the writing you do for

Fresh Eyes
So, as many of you know I am knee-deep into edits for Lacrimosa.  The rough draft was finished a month ago, and I edited through my crit group as I wrote…so the rough draft is a little stronger than a typical rough draft. A little… But now that it is in the hands of betas – and they are appropriately shredding and helping find the holes – I am getting the “fresh eyes” I need to see the story from a new perspective.  So, with the help of my best writerly buds, I’ve set some lofty goals and deadlines to get this baby polished up and in the best shape I can!!! Thanks Betas and crit buds…without you, this would b a

NaNo fun…maybe!!!
Hey guys…how’s NaNo coming along?  Before I talk about my NaNo experience for 2009, I thought I’d share a bit of what my children have written for their NaNo novels, as well as a little of mine…all in the hopes of motivating me to write a little more: Erika’s (My 9-year-old) Nano novel – a children’s or MG story about an octopus that has become a human girl. “Well, what are we supposed to do about my missing tentacle?”  I asked after a section of silence. “You could go on a voyage.  Try to find it,” Cacie suggested.