Sue Bradford Edwards's Blog, page 222

Rewriting, Revising, and Using Things in New Ways

If you are anything like me, keeping your desk organized is a challenge.  There is no shortage of pens, markers, highlighters and pencils floating around here but finding what I need when I need it is always a challenge. Given my love of color, your standard desk organizer simply is not sufficient. For quite a […]

Nonfiction Research: What If You Can’t Find the Facts that You Need?

Monday I’ll be turning in a book on the Dakota Access Pipeline.  Invariably 25% of the comments/questions that I get from my editor will be requests for more information.  Why did this person do X instead of Y?  Where did he get this idea?  Why didn’t he do Z instead? Most of the time, I […]

Anti-Hero vs Flawed Main Character

“Only villains are evil — antiheros are deluded, damaged individuals.” –David Weisberg I read this quote today in a Writer’s Digest article and it definitely made me think.  I can’t say that I necessarily agree at least with the part about villains, but that’s largely because we don’t see many true villains any more (Voldemort […]

Crystal Kite Award: It Is Time to Cast Your Vote!

If you are an SCBWI member, it is time to cast your vote in the Crystal Kite Awards.  For those of you who have not vote before, the Crystal Kites are voted on by your peers, fellow authors and illustrators.  There is an award for each of the 15 SCBWI regional divisions worldwide. This is […]

Fact Checking: Finding Out You Wrote It Wrong

Even when you are writing fiction, your facts need to be factual.  Fantasy, science fiction, whatever.  Your facts have got to add up.  So we research and write and research some more. But sometimes it isn’t the research that reveals a mistake in your data.  It’s just life.  Just over a week ago, we sorted […]

Counting Books: Thinking out of the box

Just a few days ago, I reviewed Billions of Bricks: A Counting Book about Building by Kurt Cyrus.  It was a marvelous lesson in out-of-the-box thinking. When I picked up the book, I expected something along the lines of one brick, two bricks . . . up through ten. But Cyrus gives the reader anything but the […]

Poem a Day Challenge or PAD

Saturday is April 1st and it marks the beginning of the 2017 PAD (Poem a Day) Challenge.  The challenge is open to anyone, professional poet or novice, and is hosted by Writer’s Digest editor Robert Lee Brewer.  You can find his guidelines for the challenge here. The purpose of the challenge is to write one poem each and […]

Inspiration: It Comes from All Over, Whenever

Inspiration can come from some pretty strange places. I found this cap in an antique store about 10 years ago. I spotted it because of the calcium carbide lamp on the front. I knew this was a mining lamp because my grandad used them in the mercury mines but the cap was so small. It […]

The Chant: Another Poetic Form

One of the poetic forms that we studied in Peggy Archer’s workshop was the chant.  The example that Peggy gave was from April Pulley Sayre’s Trout, Trout, Trout!  I have to admit, I didn’t see myself writing a chant so I didn’t take a lot of notes. Bad, bad me.  Because the other when I was […]

The Nonfiction Proposal: Or Rebooting My Agent Search

At this point all of my agent queries are dead in the water.  I’m going to have to wait until I finish the book that I’m working on before I can get any more queries out there. No, I’m not procrastinating.  The first batch of agents didn’t want proposals.  They just wanted a query letter […]