Bev Pettersen's Blog, page 19

It’s Golden Heart / RITA Nomination Announcement Day!!!

LET THE CYBER-PARTY BEGIN… Golden Heart and RITA nomination phone calls are going out today, and thousands of hopeful romance authors are trembling with anticipation as they wait to see if their phone will ring!! We’re here to cheer, commiserate, celebrate, hold hands with other nervous hopefuls, give you good company to gnaw your fingernails with, or whatever it is you’re needing today. (Chocolate, maybe? Who cares if it’s the crack of dawn? Tear open that bag of M&Ms, baby!!) As each of the...

Preparing for a Reader Conference

Have you ever attended a Reader Writer get together, event, or conference? As an author, I love spending a weekend with readers! And just as there are varied and wonderfully unique books, there are different types of reader weekends. As an attending author, I need to tailor my preparations to the type of reader event to make the most of the opportunity.

Tomorrow I leave for Romancing Williamsburg, a new Historical Romance Writer/Reader weekend event in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. Romanci...

Behind the Black Moment

As a writer starts to learn her craft, she’ll start hearing certain catch phrases – the inciting incident, the point of no return, the black moment.  Those are the beats, the story moments we have learned are commonly part of satisfying plot arcs. Something will to happen to disrupt our character’s life, they will have to make a choice they can’t turn back from, and then toward the end there will to be a moment when all seems to be lost, when it looks like they won’t succeed and the happy end...

From “Book in a Week” to BOOK!

Using the wonders of Yahoo groups and RWA online forums, my RWA land chapter, Midwest Fiction Writers, hosts a couple of virtual ‘meetings’ in addition to our monthly in-person meetings, where members can get cheerleading, support, and companionship while trying to meet their personal writing goals.

The first, “Club 100,” helps our members develop and maintain sustainable, long-term writing habits. In its purest form, “Club 100” participants commit to writing (or editing, or revising) at leas...

2019 Winter Writing Festival CLOSING CEREMONIES

Somehow it’s happened again: It’s DAY FIFTY of the Winter Writing Festival! And that means this is our closing day for this year.  I’m never sure whether to cheer or heave a melancholy sigh…but I’m so, so proud of all the wonderful hard work that’s gone on since the 10th of January, and I hope each and every participant is looking back with pride at what they’ve accomplished!!

Today is our final Check-In Thursday and Closing Ceremonies combined, but you still have ALL DAY  today to work towa...

How to Get “Tight” – Ruby Reprise

“Needs tightening.”My least favorite comment. I hate tightening.  Hate it at the gym.  Hate it with my household budget.  Really, really hate it with my writing.

I love the luxuriance of books, the lavishness of language.  Back in first grade, I always needed extra sheets of story-paper for Writing Time, and never got around to drawing the stupid picture.  My very first completed romance-novel chapter?  Thirty-five pages long.  Yup, thirty-five.  Even Charles Dickens would cringe.

Years ago,...

Share a Snippet!!

We’re in the final stretch of the 2019 Winter Writing Festival, with only three more days to go after today! That means those of us who’ve stuck with it have been working for 47 days, creating lots and lots of new words. As we always do a couple of times during the WWF, we’re inviting everyone to share a little snippet–a short scene, maybe, or just a paragraph or two. Even a fun line you’ve come up with, or an idea for your story. Be brave, and SHARE!!

So, We’ve GOTTA Talk About This Plagiarism Thing

Don’t know about you, but I’m still having trouble picking my jaw up off the floor. Nothing could be weirder than #CockyGate, but #CopyPasteCris is a close second for the sheer bonkers chutzpah that seems to be involved. In case you spent the last few days under a rock, here’s the deal: On Monday, Courtney Milan, tipped off by a loyal reader who recognized passages stolen from Milan, published a stunning blog post showing a long series of nearly identical side-by-side text from Milan’s (awes...

Winter Writing Festival Check-In #6!!

We’ve completed our SIXTH week, with JUST ONE MORE TO GO in the 2019 Winter Writing Festival!!

It always amazes me how fast it all rushes by…but ONE WHOLE WEEK LEFT is still plenty of time to get some serious writing done!

Hopefully, we’ll be turning the corner soon on all the winter storms and flus and dark-sky evenings, and spring will be warming and brightening the world (that’s what the groundhog promised, right??). 

We hope the Winter Writing Festival has kept your creative fires burning...

You Can Do It YOUR Way!!

        During the Festival, lots of us have been focused on word counts: how many words during a sprint, how many words per day, how many words of a manuscript have we written?

But numbers aren’t necessarily everything, and there’s no magic number that works for everyone.

Stephen King famously writes 10 pages daily. That’s between 2500 and 3300 words every day. Every day, even holidays and his own birthday. Apparently, he’s a big believer in momentum.

But big, booming word counts like that...