Sue Bradford Edwards's Blog, page 232

Our Audience: Listening to What Teens Have to Say

One of the best things about the internet is that it gives us a chance to connect with a wide variety of people.  Some of these people are even our target readers.  You can check out what teens post in chats or the videos that they post on Youtube.  Some of my favorites are the […]

SCBWI Reading List Available

I’m between jobs at the moment.  Yes, I’m still writing and working but I always feel a bit adrift when I don’t have a real deadline.  I should have known SCBWI wouldn’t let me drift along for too long. The SCBWI 2016 Winter Reading List is out and my book, The Bombing of Pearl Harbor, is listed on […]

Details: Keeping in Character

This morning I started a new audio book.  No, I’m not going to tell you the name because, as much as I love it, I’m pointing out a detail that pulled me out of the story.  The main character is teenage girl from “upstairs.”  Her family is old money and she attends finishing school for […]

How Do You Plot a Series: Altogether Now or Book by Book

Saturday, I finished listening to the last book in Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Cycle.  Somehow I decided that it was a three book series.  When I finished book #3, it was so clearly not a series ending that I took another look.  Four books.  There are four books.  Yesterday I finished The Raven King.   […]

Plotting a Novel with Depth

As I get ready to make a second attempt at plotting out my novel, I’m rereading The Plot Whisperer and The Plot Whisperer Workbook.  I’m not even past chapter 2 and I’ve already found a problem with my earlier attempts at plotting which felt confused and haphazard.  The best books are plotted at three levels — the action, […]

NoNoNaNo

What is the saying about the well laid plans of mice and men?  I actually looked it up and found this in the American Heritage Dictionary.  “No matter how carefully a project is planned, something may still go wrong with it. The saying is adapted from a line in “To a Mouse,” by Robert Burns, “The […]

Finding Fact: Research and Slant

Yesterday, Election Day, I saw a tweet that I badly wanted to forward.  It was a reminder that the majority of suffragettes were also racist and that we shouldn’t let our enthusiasm cause another person pain. Good point, but I knew that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn’t only work to gain women the […]

Picking a Publisher: Don’t Forget to Examine Books

The other night I sat on one end of the sofa with a pile of picture books from the library.  I needed to find a book for my review blog, Bookshelf. I read a few pages in a picture book about how cars work.  When I got to the spread on the internal combustion engine, […]

Agents and Editors Looking for Manuscripts

Wish you knew who wanted your particular manuscript?  At least once a week, more often two or three times, I stop by twitter and read the #MSWL (Manuscript Wish List) posts.  Sunday night I learned that: Dial’s Ellen Cormier would like to find a YA with a character who slips into or back into “disordered eating […]

Best books of 2016

Okay, I wouldn’t post this before Halloween but we are now safely in November so I feel safe recommending gift books. A lot of the writers I know like to give books as gifts.  Fortunately Writer’s Digest has put together a fifty item list of the best children’s and teen books of 2016.  I’m only […]