By Laura Drake This novel writing is very hard stuff.  Trying to learn craft while balancing plot, ideas, genre, and market. How anyone finishes a novel amazes me. Sometimes it feels like I’m golfing and juggling . . . at the same time. We all have our own ways not to write. You know […]

By Sharla Rae I preach Like With Like to my critique partners all the time and once in a while, they remind me to practice what I preach. So what do I mean by like with like? It’s not as easy to explain on paper as it is to point out the mistake in a […]

by Sharla Rae In Laura Drake’s recent blog My Editing Peeves, here at WITS, she points out dialogue tags. I have to agree that too many “saids” on a page or even in a chapter are annoying. Sure there are other tags like snarled, whispered, interjected, cried etc. But again, they stand out if overused. Included […]

Laura Drake We all have them.  Things that make us crazy, whether we’re reading a novel for pleasure or critiquing a colleague’s work.  We’re readers first, and I believe these peeves are forged by what we’ve read; like Chinese water torture they fall, drop by drop, until you notice them and continuing until you can’t […]

By Sharla Rae Most of us know author Charlaine Harris for her famous Sookie Stackhouse books which evolved into the True Blood series on Television. But she’s also written other series, the Harper Connelly Mystery series and the Lily Bard Mysteries. I just finished Grave Secrets, her 4th and possibly the last installment and on the […]