It’s a Good Day to Write


It’s truly autumn here now.  Still not coat weather, but lovely and brisk.  Leaves all over the place.  And today it’s overcast and blowsy, a day made for curling up in blankets with hot chocolate and dogs and making stuff up about demons and humans and other animals  

I’m never tempted by sunny days, probably because I’ve spent my entire life fighting allergies and asthma–breathing, it’s a good thing–but when the weather turns in spring or fall, I come alive.  There’s just so much promise in the air in spring, so much last-ditch energy in autumn when everything’s trying to get its act together for winter.  Winter here is beautiful and thanks to global warming, not nearly as cold as it used to be.  Summer is amazing, but spring and autumn are the times when things move.  

Which makes me think of story structure.  (Everything makes me think of story structure.) Continue reading

Visual Discovery Drafting

Krissie and Toni and I talked about the future and the Monday Street books last weekend, and that sent me back to the VooDooPad wiki we’d set up for the entire world of that series.  I hadn’t been back there for three years, so a lot of it was out of date, including the diagrams.  And since in my story, Cat lives in the church, I went back in and redid the church diagram I’d done to show Toni the layout since her Keely was going to be moving through the different levels, too.   And just like that, I was back in the story and I remembered how important those visuals are to me.

Continue reading

This Is A Good Book Thursday: The ReReaders’ Edition

Have you ever re-read a book you loved and found it less?  Not the ones you loved when you were a kid and find wanting now that you’re an adult, a book you read for the first time lately and then went back for a reread.  I’m having that experience, and it’s weird.  It’s not as though I liked those books for the plots (although the plots were good), I liked the characters, too, but now I find my mind wandering and not finishing.  Yet I’ve returned to books I read twenty years ago and still found them compelling.

What makes one book re-readable and another one not?

Oh, and what did you read this week?

SaveSave