Hillary DePiano's Blog, page 41

Write the Kitchen Sink aka don’t hold any of the good stuff back for the mythical future

The most useful writing advice and I literally can’t remember where I heard it. But the idea behind it is to leave it all on the table. To put all your best stuff into this book and don’t save anything for mythical future books that may never exist.

I took a break from rewriting mybook because it was incredibly frustrating to be stymied yet again and worked on some other projects. But I kept thinking about it. Well, I kept thinking about the sequel anyway.

See, I finished the original book m...

Research and rethink: the value of downtime during a massive rewrite

I took a break from rewriting my novel.

I’d thought I had it after experimenting and started moving forward with my rewrite again. I actually got to that same third of the way point from the last draft and started to suspect that, though I’d made a bunch of changes, it still wasn’t enough. The book was still missing something and I was wasting my time writing a second flawed version until I figured out what it was. I finally had to put it aside for a while because I was getting no where.

But I...

Experiment to break free of your original draft and truly rewrite your novel

You need to rewrite your novel but you’re at a loss of where to start. I’ve been there and I’m sharing what helped me to toss my original version and reinvent my book fresh.

The Brute Force method didn’t work.I needed to shake things up and that wasn’t going to happen without some real effort. I couldn’t just sit down and write a whole new book, I needed to experiment first.

I went back to my query draft and started rewriting chapter by chapter so that the events were the same but everything...

Thinking of scrapping your novel and rewriting it from scratch? Brute force isn’t enough.

I recently scrappeda polished, praised “finished” draft and completely rewrote it from scratch.I found almost no articles to help with this kind of extensive rewritedespite the fact that it has to be more common than anyone would admit. Surely I am not the first writer to realize the bones of the story were right but they had the skeleton together all wrong many drafts later. To that end, I thought it would be helpful to detail exactly what I did to get to this point, in the order I did it, i...

The hardest part of rewriting a book is letting go of the earlier versions

Back in 2009, I finished the project nicknamed Mistress Novel. I rewrote and revised it until it was as good as I could make it on my own and sent it to Beta readers in April 2011. I made another round of extensive edits based on that feedback and had a “finished” versionI started to query in the summer of 2011. I was pleasantly surprised by how the query process went and things were happening… but then life hit me like a truck in the start of 2012 (which is a funnier metaphor if you’ve read...

I’ve got a brand new comedy & I want YOUR production to be the official premiere!

Weak Days

a comedy in one-actby Hillary DePiano

6-7 Gender Neutral roles

Run Time: 40 – 45 minutes

We’ve all got our routines. It’s comfortable, doing the same thing every day. But when something makes you stop and really look at your life, you may find yourself wondering, is this really living? Are you making the most of the time you have or are your days, well, weak? Weak Days zooms out and looks at our daily routines from a new perspective as all five weekdays play out at simultaneously across...

Updates on Mistress Novel, The Fourth Orange, The Green Bird and my next e-commerce book

While mymail list got a sneak peek of something coming soon yesterday,it’s far from the only thing in the pipeline. Here’s a quick update on what I’m working on right now:

I finished a new play a few weeks ago. My mailing list is getting first crack at it but I’ll have more to share about that with the rest of you soon.
Right now, I’m rewriting Mistress Novel from scratch with the intent of getting some kind of complete rough draft of the new version ready by the end of the month. This is a mas...

Win eBook copies of all my books and plays in this giveaway!

I don’t know if this Burger King slogan caught on with anyone else but I actually say this all the time.

I set up a mailing list a long time ago but I’ve never really pushed it here on the blog for a variety of reasons not worth going into. But exciting thing are happening at Burger King, as they say (OK, fine, no one but me says that but still) and it’s time to get real with a lot of things, building amailing list being one of them. I would greatly appreciate you joining said mailing list her...

True or False? It’s impossible to keep the NaNoWriMo writing pace up year round.

When I was at the TGIO* for my NaNoWriMo area last year, we were talking about keeping the writing going year round because a lot of my Wrimos have no problem writing 50,000 words every November but struggle to write anywhere near that the entire rest of the year combined. I was trying to sell them on setting a yearly goal like I do and they were interested. One Wrimo asked me what I would recommend setting as a goal for a first timer and clarified that by saying something to the effect of, “...

The Love of Three Oranges and that citrus smell gag: sixth scents?

Scratch and sniff opera: At “Love for Three Oranges” in 1998, patrons received a scratch and sniff card. During the production someone would hold up a number and audience members would scratch off the corresponding number on their card and be “rewarded” with a scent that complemented what was happening on stage. The scents: gunpowder, disinfectant, fart, meat, perfume and oranges.

-Portland Opera at 50: grander and weirder than you thought | OregonLive.com

There’s a gag in my stage play version...