So, you’ve written a first draft of a novel. Now what?  If you’re like most writers, the thought of revising your first draft (especially if it’s a messy one) is so daunting, you’re afraid to even begin. Sadly, many authors finish a first draft and then tuck it in the proverbial drawer never to be  … Read more

The Karma Club Better You Than Me The Geography of Lost Things I Speak Boy Suns Will Rise Amelia Gray is Almost Okay I could go on and on but I’ll save you the time and just tell you what all of these books have in common. Apart from the fact that they were all  … Read more

Your novel’s first page is like the first 5 minutes of a blind date. Be honest, you can usually tell within the first five minutes whether or not there’s going to be a second date. Just like readers can tell by the end of the first page whether or not they’re going to stick around  … Read more

You finished a first draft. Phew! And now you may or may not be staring at a huge pile of messy pages that may or may not resemble a novel. My guess is you’re exhausted. You’re burnt out. You’re sick of this story and all of the characters and never want to look at them  … Read more

It’s officially NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) where writers across the globe challenge themselves to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November.  To help you smash through that 50k word mark, I’m sharing with you my NaNoWriMo Starter Beat Sheet. What’s a “starter beat sheet?” Well, think of it as a foundation  … Read more

It’s no big secret that if we want to hook readers from the first chapter, we actually have to write a first chapter that hooks readers. With TBR stacks getting taller and taller, and Netflix releasing a new bingeable show every twenty minutes, gone are the days when readers will graciously give new books 50,  … Read more

Well, we made it! It’s 2021. 2020 is now officially “history.” And I don’t know about you but 2020 felt like a very messy first draft to me. Full of false starts, random plot twists that made no sense, a hard-to-follow narrative, and very poor pacing.  But although we can’t revise that mess, we can  … Read more

At the center of your story’s universe lies the answer… Every solar system has a sun at its center. Every atom of matter has a nucleus at its core. Every swarm of alien space pods has a mothership to guide them all back home. And every story has a center point around which all other  … Read more

So, you’ve just finished writing your (possibly very messy) first draft! Which means it’s time to start the revising.  When I finish a first draft I immediately start to think about my revision plan and soon (after a much-needed break!) you should too!  Here are the 5 things I focus on for my first revision  … Read more

This tip will help you manage your list of revision tasks with efficiency (and sanity!) It’s a trick I picked up over several months of revising BETWEEN BURNING WORLDS (the sequel to my sci-fi space opera, SKY WITHOUT STARS). During the revision period of this book my co-author and I had a lot of super  … Read more

Stories are made inside our heads. Worlds are built, characters are born and die, universes are constructed. And yet, sometimes our silent brain space fails us. Sometimes, we get stuck and just can’t think our way out of a problem. Here’s a simple yet effective hack to help you deal with writer’s block and get  … Read more

Have you ever found yourself staring down a page or chapter in your revision, knowing you have to cut or rewrite major chunks of text, and thinking, “I DON’T WANNA DO IT!” Or maybe you say to yourself, something along the lines of, “But I love that passage! It’s some of my best work!” But we all  … Read more

More than fifteen novels under my belt and I’m STILL learning how to write and revise. Case in point: when working on the fourth and final draft of SKY WITHOUT STARS, the epic young adult space opera based on Les Mis that I co-wrote with Joanne Rendell, I was forced to solve a problem I’d never  … Read more

Imagine if someone handed you a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle and told you to put it together. “Fine,” you say, “what is it supposed to look like? Do you have a picture of the final product?”  “No,” comes the callous response.   Then you turn over all of the pieces to find that they’re completely blank. There’s  … Read more

Let’s face it. Writing is about .01% pure inspiration and about 99.99% tricking our brain into just getting words down on the page every day. I’m ALL for tricking my brain into doing things it doesn’t want to do. Those of you who have taken my Productivity Hacks for Writers course know I’m the master  … Read more