If you know me at all, you know I get a bit twitchy when it comes to what I like to call ‘faux medieval fantasy.’ It’s not that I have a problem with dragons, magic, or even princesses-in-disguise (okay, well, yes, I have a problem with that). What makes me turn into a biter is…
The editor. The dreaded arbiter of your writing. The judge and jury of your style. The only thing standing between you and publication. The unrelenting taskmaster. The sensei of craft to your grasshopper of words. An editor should be all these things, yet all too often, many freelance editors are not much more than glorified…
It’s that time of year again. You know what I mean. Time for diet sabotaging, socializing with people we can’t stand, and going way over budget on Amazon. But, there’s another Amazon, one that can take us away from all this noise (i.e. non-stop Christmas music), hustle (sit DOWN, Black Friday), and bustle (don’t even…
We’re two weeks into NaNoWriMo, and I’d wager that a bunch of us are stuck in the morass that I like to call the ‘Sticky Middle.’ We have made it through the first heady 5,000 words. Maybe even 15,000 or 20,000 words. But, now? The words are coming slower. The ideas are coming even slower…
Did you just stop and ask yourself that? Did the Burning Reason trip off the tip of your tongue, or did you stare blankly at the screen and think: a.) “Oh, crap, there’s ANOTHER thing Cait wants me to think about and that I probably need to up my writing game.” or b.) “What the…
Ah, November, the annual hunt for the 50,000 word count. The mating call of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is the sound of a million fingers tapping out 1,667 words a day for 30 days. There are lots of tools and encouragement to help us cross the finish line: NaNoWriMo’s coaches, Twitter and writing sprints,…
What on earth is a catalogue raisonné you ask? (And very reasonably so.) A catalogue raisonné is a systematic, annotated catalog. Put another way, it’s a critical bibliography. Or, put most simply, it’s my guide to little reading projects on a topic. Want to know about Victorian Murder? South American exploration? Ancient Greece? So do I….
Writers get advice all the time not to listen to their Inner Editor–that snarky, perfectly manicured voice that has always has good hair and has probably never done a sniff test on a t-shirt in her life. But, there’s another voice we need to worry about: the Inner Pushy Stage Director. Who or what is…
Full disclosure: after I post this blog, I’m probably going to go day drink and listen to Aretha’s “Respect” on repeat. Mansplaining romance and erotica has a way of doing that to me. Yesterday, Robert Gottlieb wrote a round-up of romance novels in the New York Times Book Review. Frankly, it’s more like he herds…
I have long wanted to write about one of my greatest literary influences. Figuring out just how to do it, however, has been tricky. I wanted to introduce everyone to E.F. Benson’s “Lucia” series, but then, part of me worried that 1920’s-1930’s English county life satire might not be everyone’s cup of tea. I might…