Sue Bradford Edwards's Blog, page 254
January 14, 2016
Inspiration from Life
In order to help your readers connect with your writing, it helps to provide an emotion that resonates with them. Explorers feel excitement and anticipation. When things go wrong, they may feel dread or frustration. To write these things realistically, you just need to connect with emotional inspiration in your own life. Recently, my son […]
January 13, 2016
Dialogue: Writing Dialect or in Another Language
One of the toughest things to do in writing fiction, IMO (no H involved), is to write dialogue. Too often we try to make it sound real and end up making it sound strange. This is especially true when we try to write dialect or imitate a foreign language. I once read a book that […]
January 12, 2016
Agents: And the Search Goes On…
As we head into 2016, I’m still on the lookout for an agent. I have 3 submissions out at this point. Kristen Hall from Catbird Literary has had it for 2 months which really isn’t all that long even for a 200 word picture book. Yes, I am being serious. Until an agent opens an e-mail submission, […]
January 11, 2016
ALA Awards 2016
As much as I love, Love, LOVE seeing which books won and grabbing up the winners, I’m glad I know longer review for the paper. Why? Although I no longer get the books for free, I also no longer have to drive around town picking them up at libraries and books stores, defending to my […]
January 10, 2016
Screenless Weekends
One of the best writing habits I’ve ever developed doesn’t actually involve writing. It involves going off-line and screen free. Unfortunately, I broke this particular habit during one of my book rewrites. I need to redevelop it. At least one day each weekend, I don’t even turn on my computer. I don’t check my e-mail. […]
January 7, 2016
Backstory: Not a Dirty Word
If you’ve been writing for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve heard or read warnings about backstory. Don’t give the reader too much at once. Beware the info dump. Yada, yada, yada. In fact, I’ve written two posts about the infodump problem, here and here. And there’s a good reason for these warnings. Too […]
January 6, 2016
Pie for Chuck
Every now and again I come across a book and as I read it I think “I wonder.” Pie for Chuck by Pat Schories is part of Holiday House’s I Like to Read line. They call them easy-reading picture books. I would simply call them easy readers or beginning readers. Tomayto. Tomahto. As I read this […]
January 5, 2016
Ambassador Gene Luen Yang
On Monday, the Library of Congress named graphic novel/comic book author Gene Luen Yang as the national ambassador for young people’s literature. The position was created by the library in 2008 and Yang is the first graphic novel author to receive the honor. Previous ambassadors include Walter Dean Myers, Katherine Patterson, and Jon Scieszka. As […]
January 4, 2016
Preparing for ReviMo 2016
For those of you who don’t know about this program, ReviMo is Revise More. It is a picture book revision challenge in which participants pledge to revise 5 days during the week of the challenge. This year that would be January 10 through January 16. You can revise five different manuscripts or you can revise […]
January 3, 2016
Scheduling Your Next Project
Sometimes it is really easy to decide what to work on next. Deadlines must be met, whether an editor is expecting your manuscript or you simply have to turn it in during their reading period. But then you reach a point where you don’t have any deadlines. That’s where I am right now. I can […]
