Angela Ackerman Are you afraid of using the weather in your writing? If so, you're not alone. After all, if not careful, weather description can be a minefield of clichés. The sunny, cloudless afternoon at the beach. The gloomy rainstorm at a funeral. Overdone setting and weather pairings can lie flat on the page. Then […]

 Piper Bayard A character arc in fiction, as in life, is the path by which a character transcends his deepest fear to achieve greatness. Without this evolution, the reader has no reason to travel with that character through the story.     To create this character arc, we must know our character’s greatest fear. According […]

Susan Spann The year is drawing to a close, but our series on anthology contracts is going strong. Today, it’s time to say “show me the money” - and look at some of the different royalty structures in the anthology world. Some anthologies pay the contributors royalties, while others offer a flat fee, and still […]

Margie Lawson Surprise! Today’s blog is on wrangling time, not words. But don’t stop reading! I added examples from an ARC of THE DIRT ON NINTH GRAVE, by NYT Bestseller, and Immersion-Grad, Darynda Jones. I bet you’ll agree, the examples are super-stellar! I promise to keep the wrangling time part of the blog short. You’ll […]

Julie Glover The hardboiled detective, the spoiled princess, the bad boy with a heart of gold, the diamond-in-the-rough heroine—surely, these sound familiar. We’ve read them, and we may have written them. Call them tropes or archetypes, but they’re recognizable characters who can easily fall flat on the page. And flat characters are about as appealing […]