Jami Gold's Blog: Jami Gold, Paranormal Author, page 35

Genre -Is- Worldbuilding

Here's the latest from Jami Gold, Paranormal Author :

Between my health issues and packed to-do list, I’m constantly behind on the latest movies. For example, I think this past summer I saw only Wonder Woman and Dunkirk, even though several more were on my “want to see” list.

(At least that list isn’t as overwhelming as my to-be-read pile of books. That numbers in the hundreds…maybe thousands. Um, yay for Kindles? *grin*)

So it’s unfortunately not a surprise that this past weekend, I finally...

NaNo Prep: Getting a Handle on Our Story

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Many writers will spend the month of November dedicating every spare minute to writing as they participate in National Novel Writing Month (known as NaNoWriMo or just plain NaNo). So now is the perfect time to start thinking about what story idea we want to explore next.

A common assumption about NaNo is that people write gibberish (or close to it) to meet the word count demands, cramming 50,000 words into a 30-day deadline. To be sure, so...

Do You Share Your Expertise?

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Many of us suffer from impostor syndrome, the feeling that we’re a fraud and it’s just a matter of time until others realize it. That feeling goes double (or more) in the writing world, where the learning curve is steep and we can feel like a newbie many times over.

Even after we get a handle on writing craft, we start over again at the bottom of the curve with the next step of the process: publishing (whether that’s learning about agents,...

Sexy Scenes: Open Door or Closed Door?

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Last time, we discussed how to get over our dread and write sexy scenes for our stories. As I mentioned in that post, no matter our genre, at some point in our career, we might need to write depictions of intimacy.

However, there’s a wide range of what “intimacy” means for our writing. We could be referring to the description of any specific action, how “far” our characters go in the scene, or how openly we let readers experience the scene...

Dread Writing Sexy Scenes? 5 Tips for Success

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Several years ago, I wrote the original version of this post to help others struggling with this issue. However, now that I have several more writing years—and many more sexy scenes—under my belt, I wanted to revisit the topic and see if I could add more insights. *smile*

Whatever genre we write, we often have to write scenes that make us uncomfortable. Some of us struggle with making our protagonist’s life difficult and settle for a too-g...

5 Questions to Ask Before Hiring Help: Part Two — Guest: Jeff Lyons

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As I mentioned last week, I’ve written several posts here over the years about how to research and evaluate editors to help us with our writing and storytelling craft:

the differences between the types of editors (development/content editors, line editors, copy editors, & proofreaders) how to evaluate editors to determine their strengths (especially as an editor’s skills don’t always match their title description) how to determine the bes...

What Should Our Story’s Climax Include?

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Regular readers of my blog know I’m a big fan of story structure and beat sheets (even though I write by the seat of my pants). Story structure is what makes our story feel like a story, so it’s important for storytelling.

(And if we’ve ever read a marginally crafted book that we couldn’t put down, we know the value of storytelling for overcoming our writing weaknesses. *smile*)

I’ve written several posts that dig into different sections o...

5 Questions to Ask Before Hiring Help: Part One — Guest: Jeff Lyons

Here's the latest from Jami Gold, Paranormal Author :

Over the years, I’ve written several posts here about how to research and evaluate editors to help us with our writing and storytelling craft:

the differences between the types of editors (development/content editors, line editors, copy editors, & proofreaders) how to evaluate editors to determine their strengths (especially as an editor’s skills don’t always match their title description) how to determine the best editor for us (as “best...

How Do Story Beats Work in Our Genre?

Here's the latest from Jami Gold, Paranormal Author :

It’s time for another one of my guest posts over at Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi’s Writers Helping Writers site. As one of their Resident Writing Coaches, I’ve previously shared:

encouragement for approaching an overwhelming revision how to increase the stakes (the consequences for failure) in our story 7 ways to indicate time passage in our stories (and 2 issues to watch out for)

With this turn for another coaching article at WHW,...

Don’t Believe These Writing Myths: Part Two — Guest: Jeff Lyons

Here's the latest from Jami Gold, Paranormal Author :

As we discussed last week, if you’ve hung around the writing community, you’ve probably seen a lot of advice. And while much of the advice out there is great and helpful, other advice that gets passed around is misleading, impossible to follow, or just plain wrong.

Luckily, Jeff Lyons is here to help clear up the confusion. Today, he brings us Part Two of his list of the most common writing myths, and he’ll be giving us the scoop on what’s...