by Margie Lawson, @MargieLawson If you watch NCIS, you know Jethro Gibbs, aka Mark Harmon, has rules. Fifty-plus rules. My next fifteen (or fifty) blogs will feature a different Margie-Rule for writers. [Click here for Margie's Rule #1: Never Take Any Word for Granted.] Margie’s Rule #2: Write the Hard Stuff: Facial Expressions Write the […]

by Jenny Hansen, @JennyHansenCA Editing and Proofreading: Two separate processes that equal one great story. Like most writers, I hang out with a boatload of other writers. Still, I never saw much of other peoples’ works in progress until I coordinated a contest several years ago. Coordinating contests changed the way I see writing. Period. It was […]

Turning Whine into Gold By Kathryn Craft, @KCraftWriter Last year, Janice Gable Bashman and I co-wrote an article for Writer’s Digest Magazine, The 7 Deadly Sins of Self-Editing, that turned out to be quite popular. Apparently sinning resonated with writers (go figure!) who recognized that greed, lust, gluttony, pride, sloth, envy, and wrath might be […]

by Tiffany Lawson Inman, @NakedEditor There it is.  LARGE bold print peering out at me from underneath the Life and Home section….THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLERS LIST, nagging me to grab my Kindle and start downloading fabulous fiction at lightning speed. Sounds magical, doesn’t it? Right now I’m talking about that list.  You know […]

By Sharla Rae, @SharlaWrites If poets are to be believed, eyes are the windows to the soul. Rather than using clichéd or common descriptions, why not use "explicit" eye descriptions to give your reader a real peek into a character’s psyche? I’ll touch on eye color, movement, and appearance and, of course, I have some helpful lists […]