Sign up for Melanie's newsletter --> Sign me up!
For those of you who are NOT writers, a beta reader is someone who reads a draft of your manuscript to tell you where you’ve screwed up and how to make it better. Some even tell you where they laughed out loud, gasped, or wanted to punch a character (thanks Nadine!).
Dictionary.com defines the slang version of beta as:
Happy almost new year! I hope everyone had a nice holiday and is ready to close out 2013 with a bang. The first draft of Fracture is currently with a couple beta readers and while I wait to hear back from them, I’m brainstorming the yet-to-be-titled Book 3 in the series. I know the overall …
I finished the first draft of Fracture! I missed my self-imposed deadline by a week, but considering how long it took me to get back in my writing groove, I’m okay with that. The first draft ended up being 8000 words longer than I expected, so there’s the extra week! In all I’m happy with …
As most of you know, November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and while I’m not competing officially, I’ve quietly sucked the enthusiasm and ambition from my fellow writers to push through to the end of my wip, Fracture. That’s right — I’m THIS CLOSE to finishing the sequel to Flicker! NaNo competitors are supposed …
This post originally aired in October 2011. I thought it was worth resharing. While perusing the pumpkin “patch” (shelves) at my grocery store last weekend, this one struck me as the roundest, cleanest, most pumpkiny pumpkin of the bunch. In fact, I was so pleased with nature’s work that I considered leaving it alone and …
Getting started is the easy part. You have an idea, you jump in with both feet, and then…. and then… you hit a wall. This is me at our local mud run last weekend. My husband and I ran it last year and I immediately wanted to build an obstacle course in the backyard. We …
It’s blog hop time! For the uninitiated, a blog hop is when a group of writers (or otherwise connected bloggers) answer the same series of questions then tag both the people who tagged them as well additional people. You know, to keep you hopping from blog to blog. My good friend June “Bug” Kramin asked …
…and yet I almost wrote his lyrics in a conversation between my MC and her father. OOPS. I bust my butt to avoid cliches, doing my best to think outside the box and write realistic dialogue, but every now and then a commonly-used phrase slips past my defenses and finds its way into my manuscript. …
Everyone knows how difficult it can be to break bad habits. Smoking, over-eating, cracking your knuckles (not that I would EVER have a problem with cracking my knuckles…) can take more effort than some people are willing to give. And slipping up makes it even harder to keep at it. One night of binging can …
It’s official, I’m writing the sequel to FLICKER. I’ve had the idea for over a year and while I could give you the list of excuses why I hadn’t started (bought a house, got married, was trying to juggle two jobs) all those are in the past and I’ve finally begun! There’s more Biz, more …