Sue Bradford Edwards's Blog, page 183
October 11, 2018
5 Minutes a Day: NaNoWriMo
Do you plan to take part in NaNoWriMo? For those of you who have somehow missed the phenomenon that is NaNoWriMo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. During the month of November, each participant commits to drafting a 50,000 word novel. No, you can’t rewrite something you’ve already written. No, this isn’t the time to […]
October 10, 2018
Writing Humor: Oddly Specific
Way back when I first started writing, I attended a conference workshop on how to write humor. At the beginning of the session, the presenter encouraged us to imagine our character’s backpack. What would be inside? He explained that the expected items might include a math book, a spiral notebook, a pencil, even half a […]
October 9, 2018
Setting Goals: 5 Steps to Getting the Writing Done
When you write full-time, people have no problem telling you how lucky you are. “You get to do what you want every day?” While that isn’t quite true, I am far too easy for people to find, I do acknowledge that this is pretty awesome. But it can still be tricky to squeeze the writing […]
October 8, 2018
Graphic Novels: Is This Form Right for Your Story?
Last week, I attended a webinar by School Library Journal on comic book writing. The guests were Ethan Aldridge, author of Estranged, and Wendy Xu, part of the SLJ team. One of the things that they stressed was how vital it is to recognize both novels and graphic novels as legitimate means of story telling. A novel […]
October 7, 2018
Font Choice and Readability
A couple of weeks ago, I spent some time on Canva design tutorials. One of the topics was font as in matching font to message and making things interesting but readable. Imagine my surprise when my husband sent me an article he had spotted, “Sans Forgetica: The font scientists created to help you recall what […]
October 4, 2018
5 Minutes a Day: Writer’s block
No, I’m not saying that you can get beyond writer’s block in 5 minutes. But if you spend five minutes figuring out why you have it? Then you’ll know which of these methods to try. So far this year, I’ve written 6 contracted books. I’ve rewritten 4 of them. I’m about to write #7. I’ve […]
October 3, 2018
Online Presence: Should You or Shouldn’t You
Should you take time from your writing life to have an online presence? The short answer – yes. Understandably, your first job as a writer should be your writing. Whether you write poetry, early readers or young adult novels, you need to write. Most of us have to squeeze writing in between work and our […]
October 2, 2018
Occupations: The ones you feature in your writing say a lot
Recently I saw an interesting post by Becca Puglisi about character occupation. She and Angela Ackerman have an online Occupation Thesaurus available for writers. Each entry is an occupation and it includes an overview of what this occupation does, the training required, positive personality traits that might be associated with this characteristic, negative traits, and […]
October 1, 2018
Inktober
Push your limits creatively. I give this advice to other people all the time so I decided it was time to take it myself. I am taking part in Inktober. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Inktober, it is a challenge designed to encourage artists to improve their style/technique/talent and develop a habit […]
September 30, 2018
Creating an Invoice
Not too long ago, one of my writing friends contacted me. “Help! I have to invoice the publisher to get paid. I don’t even know what an invoice looks like.” More and more publishers seem to be requiring writers to invoice in order to get paid. I do this for all of the books that […]
