Laurel Garver's Blog, page 12

Steady on: progressing with multiple projects

I have a confession to make. When it comes to my writing, I can be a bit ADD. Sometimes I can hunker down with one project and give it my all for months at a time, and sometimes a great tangential idea worms its way into my head and demands my attention.

Photo by JessicaGale at morguefile.comBlogging seems to exacerbate this tendency in me. Some issue will come up in my drafting or revising or editing or marketing, I'll blog it and think Hey, this would be a great nonfiction chapter or start o...

Quick note

If you take a look at my handy-dandy profile over on the right, you'll see that I've shifted my schedule to posting on Thursdays. I ended up needing to do so last week, and it fit into my week so much better. So check this space tomorrow!

And if you've never before joined the Twitter party that is One Line Wednesday (#1linewed), come on over to Twitter, search the hashtag and join in. This week's theme is "nod." Share a snippet (or two) from your work in progress on the theme, and cheer on oth...

Building a Twitter following as an author: lessons from the trenches

I was a somewhat late adopter of Twitter, in part because the fast and short nature of posting intimidated me. I'm more of a slow and deep thinker, and at first I thought adding a Twitter feed to my life would make my head explode.

But as I shifted gears to indie publishing, I realized I needed this site to reach a wider audience. Blog reading was on the wane, and I'd heard so many positive things about Twitter, I knew I had to get a grip on my fear and jump in.

My early attempts were half-hear...

Cover reveal for my new novel, coming in May

This book has been such a long time coming, I'm feeling a strange mix of ecstatic and terrified to share it with you, my lovely readers. Without further ado, here's a sneak peek:
Coming May 2016



Paris, the City of Lights. To Dani Deane, it’s the Promised Land, where she will no longer fear losing her only parent, her arty New York life, or her devoted boyfriend.
But shortly before their Paris getaway, Mum’s tyrannical father falls ill, pulling them to rural Pennsylvania to deal with his hoarder...

A basket of writing prompts for spring

Seasonal prompts can be helpful in your routine, to get you paying attention to your immediate environment and the sensory experiences you can collect. It can also get you thinking about story potential in everyday events. Consider how to spin theses prompts for different genres or milieus. For example, try "a spring fashion trend no one could have predicted" as dystopian fiction, as fantasy, as horror, as SciFi, or as farce.

I know winter is over when...

My idea of a perfect spring day is...

Sm...

Spatial surety: moving characters around buildings

Photo credit: melschmitz,  morguefile.comDetective Fredricks completes his investigation of the dining room, then he...

goes through the French doors to examine the patio
or
takes the left exit into the butler's pantry
or
leads the officers back to the main corridor

Wait. Is there a butler's pantry? Which side of the room has French doors? What other rooms lead off this corridor?

Space, the essential frontier
Even if  you don't write mysteries, like in my example above, you likely need to m...

Rough or a route? Using coarse vs. course

Today we're tackling a set of fraternal twins of language, the homophones coarse and course. Once again, I'll provide a definition, examples and mnemonic tricks to help you keep them straight. Because spellcheck will not help you if you use the wrong term for the context.

Luckily, these two words are always different parts of speech; the A version is only an adjective, the U version is a noun or verb.

Coarse fabric (Alvimann at morguefile.com)coarse(adj.) having a rough texture, or a loose weav...

Word smart: jealousy vs. envy

Welcome to my new periodic series I'm calling "Word Smart," an expansion of my "Homophone Helps" series. In it, we will look at two words and/or concepts that writers confuse, offering clarifications to help you express your ideas most clearly and accurately.

I often hear the term "jealous"  used incorrectly as a synonym for envious or covetous or even greedy. And dictionaries, because they are descriptive (reflecting what is seen in speech) rather than prescriptive (defining rules), have...

Filtering: why it harms deep POV and how to fix it

Photo by Earl53 at morguefile.comFirst person point-of-view is way of narrating as if you were looking through someone else's eyeballs, wearing her skin, moving about the world in her body. It offers tremendous access to another person's psyche.

But only if you remember to let your reader get that close.

A common problem in writing first person POV is what I call "filtering," that is, when the character first labels an experience before experiencing it. While filtering is a staple of third pers...

Thoughts on motivation and change arcs

We're entering the Lenten season today, a time when some of us prepare for Easter by committing to putting off something--whether it be fasting from desserts or TV. or taking a break from a vice--in order to put on a new spiritual habit.
Image by Seeman, morguefile.com
There's something useful to be learned for character arcs in this.

Making changes in one's life doesn't happen by accident for the most part. There is almost always some volition involved. One commits to change when staying the sa...