Tag Archives: A to Z challenge

This year’s challenge was interesting. I wasn’t even sure I was going to participate and thought about dropping out a few times. Then I decided at the last minute to scrap my theme and go with one about writing and I was excited again about participating. Even though some posts were harder to write and others were easier to write. Talking about my works in progress is something I love to do with others. Participating in the challenge helps me to figure out what topics work and what ones don’t. I look forward to April every year because I can to meet new people and check out blogs I might not otherwise be able to. I loved sharing things like my characters with everyone. It gave me plenty of topic ideas for the rest of the year as well. I already know what my theme is going to be next year and will be starting on it soon. Next year, I’m going to change up the format just a bit. 🙂

Loved meeting all the new people that stopped by to say hi and chime in on the different topics. Unfortunately I didn’t get to visit as many sites as I would’ve liked to but I did visit as many as possible in the time I could. 🙂

Look forward to your comments. 🙂

Sometimes I think of my writing as that of running a zoo. It’s controlled chaos and everyone wants attention. You have the characters to the left that want be mean and not play well with others (the villians), in the middle there’s the ones that want to be left alone and not take sides, and to the right there’s the ones that want all of the attention all the time. They want to show off for the visitors in this case the readers. The villian want to try and trick the readers into thinking they are good then they attack. The ones that want to be left alone are the ones that are friends with both the good guy or girl and the villian. They are the ones that will be pulled in both directions and told in subtle or not so subtle ways that they have to pick sides. You try not to have your favorite ones but you do and that makes writing fun. 🙂

Look forward to your comments. 🙂

We all have them whether it’s a monthly, weekly, or yearly goal. I set goals for the month, the week, and the year. As a writer it helps keep me focused if I have a goal I want to reach. I make them realistic enough to reach. For example, a monthly goal for me might be to write 5k or 10k. It depends on how busy I know I’ll be during that particular month. A weekly goal might be to write 2k to 5k and again that depends on how much extra stuff I might have going on. A yearly goal for me is to try and write between 50k and 100k. Participating in things like Camp NaNo and NaNoWriMo help with those goals in some cases. It depends on the project I’m working on at the time. 🙂

Look forward to your comments. 🙂

Well, this is one of the harder if not the hardest letter to try and find a topic for. I never did find a topic I was happy with for this one. Now that I’m sitting here writing this post a couple of things come to mind and that’s words that you can take a letter off and it still means the same thing. For example, Xtra stands for extra, Xtreme stands for Extreme, and so on. We just shorten some of those words and still get our point across. Shortening those words also depends on the setting and who you are talking with. In some cases it would be okay to use xtra and xtreme and in others it wouldn’t. 🙂

Look forward to your comments about this topic 🙂

Worldbuilding is one of my favorite things to do for my stories especially the epic fantasy series. I use tools like Campaign Cartographer to create my world maps. This program has a few great add-ons and other tools to help create your maps and even characters. This is the main tool I use when worldbuilding. It’s usually the second or third step though. The first step is deciding what exactly is going to be part of the world. From the characters down to the weapons they’ll use. I tend to have anywhere from 30 to 60 pages of just this part of the worldbuilding. Next step is to create the world locations and the names of them. Third step would to create the map. The map will go through many changes before I have the one I’m happy with.

Here are some of the other tools I use:

Gimp

Inkscape

Word

Excel

Look forward to your comments. 🙂

I’m looking forward to participating in this event in October. Will be giving away a copy of each of my short stories. You can check out Virtual Fantasy Con for more information about it. I’m also being featured in Dec. 2016 edition of a magazine that one of the participants owns. It’s called Authors Magazine. Will give you more info on that as it gets closer to being released. 🙂

Also, I have the pleasure to be working behind the scenes of Virtual Fantasy Con as blog tour coordinator along with one other person. If you would like your blog to be part of the tour please either contact me via the contact form on here or leave the name of your blog and the url in the comments and we’ll be in touch with you. 🙂

Look forward to your comments 🙂

I couldn’t come up with anything for this one. U is hard to find topics for. I guess it could about the many, many untitled story ideas I have in a folder on my desktop that I really need to go through and see if I’m ever going to use them. I love having so many ideas to choose from but the same time I know most of them I’ll never write. The one good thing about so many untitled story ideas is that if I’m having trouble coming up with a new idea then I go and look at the list of ideas and one might pop up as being the next one I work on even if it’s just for a little bit to get the writing started again. So, my advice is don’t throw out those untitled story ideas right away because you never know when those ideas might come in handy or are ready to be written. 🙂

Look forward to your comments. 🙂

Today’s topic was going to be about timelines but I changed my mind at the last minute and decided to list my top ten favorite sites instead. Here they are 🙂

1. Wattpad– I’ve had an account on here for a while and never really used it. I did post the opening of a story about a year ago. I plan to change that though.

2. WriteOn by Kindle– Have used this in the past to get feedback on a couple of stories. Plan to add another one soon.

3. SheWrites– This one I’ve been a member for a long time and it’s good for some networking.

4. Scribophile– This a critique style site. I’ve not posted anything to it yet for feedback

5. Skrawl– This is a new one. I joined it a few months ago. It’s a site where you can post your writing to get feedback and you can allow others to write a bit of the story as well.

6. Inkitt– Have been a member of this one for a bit but haven’t posted anything. That will be changing soon.

7. Archive of Our Own– This is a really cool fanfiction site. I’ve been a member for about a year or so. Haven’t posted any of my fanfiction yet but am getting ready to change that soon.

8. Jukepop– This is a serial writing site. It’s pretty cool.

9. MythicScribes– This is a blog about fantasy writing.

10. Writer’s Digest– Great articles listed on here.

Look forward to your comments 🙂

This has to be my favorite piece of software to use. I bought it a couple of years ago after winning NaNoWriMo and am glad I did. I use the pc version so I don’t like that it doesn’t have all the perks that the mac version but I’ve heard they are trying to get the pc version to match the mac so there is hope. 🙂

I do some of my editing/revisions in scrivener but still export to word to do the majority of them because I like the track changes in word more than I like the comments section in scrivener. It does have 3 things I like though and they are the corkboard, outliner, and the label features. I also like how I can have everything from the book itself to research located in one file.

If you want to learn more about the program here’s the link. They have a free trial of it so you can download and check it out. It’s an inexpensive but great program to have in your writing tools.

Scrivener

Look forward to your comments about scrivener and what tools you use to write your great stories 🙂

Revisions are the one thing that drive me crazy but it has to be done. 🙂 I’m in the middle of revising the Vampires of New Orleans series and it’s been kind of fun but frustrating because I’ve now changed who the main character is. The new main character fits the plot more than the previous one did. So, now I’m revising the dialogue and other important points of the story. At the same time I’m thinking it was better the other way. Why is revising sometimes more frustrating than the actual writing of the story? I’ll tell you for me it’s that I don’t want to cut scenes but I know it has to be done to make the story better. 🙂

Here are a few articles I’ve found helpful when revising.

Checklist for Editors

Avoiding Common Writing Mistakes

Your Revision Checklist

Two books I’ve found helpful as well.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers

Revision and Self-Editing

Look forward to your comments about this topic 🙂