Bev Pettersen's Blog, page 21

Professional Driver, Closed Course

We’ve all seen those car commercials. Feats of driving skill on display, whether it’s a high end sedan coursing through snow or a series of cars separating at top speed along a sandy highway or a dark SUV swirling and weaving along a winding road. (I work in advertising as my day job – I could keep going on car ad tropes all day….)

In every case, if you look at the fine print at the bottom of your TV screen, you’ll see the notation, “Professional Driver, Closed Course.” It’s a legal disclaime...

Revision Tip – read text aloud

Here is a quick (and fun) tip to use during revisions of a manuscript.

As I’m revising, I often stumble over passages in a WIP, knowing something isn’t quite right with it but having no idea why.

Reading it out loud can help, but I don’t really like the sound of my own voice. I’ve discovered a way to convert text to speech (TTS) with the Speak command (aka Read Aloud) in Microsoft Word. Now that I’ve added Speak to my toolbar, I can highlight the pesky passage, close my eyes, and let a dude...

Breathing Is Necessary

Recently I recalled the discussion my chapter mates had years ago concerning our need to write. At that time, none of us could imagine not ever writing. We rose early before our families and wrote. We wrote every spare moment we had throughout the day. We spent time away from non-writer friends and family and wrote. We stayed up late and wrote, often nodding off in mid-sentence. We sacrificed a lot in order to write. We needed to write as much as we needed to breathe.

Today, most of those fri...

It’s the Week One Check-In for the 2019 Winter Writing Festival!!

The Ninth Annual Ruby Slippered Sisterhood Winter Writing Festival is fabulously under way, with the Ruby Sisters and dozens of their always-talented friends writing their hearts out! Yesterday we completed our FIRST FULL WEEK, so today it’s time to officially check in!

If you’re reading this on the Festival website (the blue site), jump on over to the regular Ruby Slippered Sisterhood blog ( the ruby-colored site, at rubyslipperedsisterhood.com) and leave a quick comment about your experie...

A Brief History of the Ruby Slippered Sisterhood!

We’ve got lots of new folks joining the Winter Writing Festival this year, some of whom may have been wondering exactly who the Ruby Slippered Sisterhood are. So here’s some quick history:

The Rubies are a true sisterhood, but not by birth.

We came together on March 25, 2009, when we were all named Finalists in the Golden Heart Contest®, run by the Romance Writers of America®. The Golden Heart has long been the highest honor in romance writing for unpublished manuscripts, and being named a f...

YESSS!!!! It’s Opening Ceremony time for the 2019 Winter Writing Festival!!

Once again, here come some of our favorite words of the year: We now declare the NINTH ANNUAL Ruby Slippered Sisterhood Winter Writing Festival OPEN! Let the Games begin!! To get your BONUS point for today, Thursday January 10, add a comment here on the regular Ruby Slippered Sisterhood blog (rubyslipperedsisterhood.com) in which you: 1) define how *you personally* will earn your Festival “points”

and

2) declare your commitment to earning 50 points by Feb 28, 2019. (Further details on goal-se...

Goal-Setting Advice for the 2019 Winter Writing Festival!

The Festival starts THIS THURSDAY!!!!  I hope you’re as excited as I am, and ready for some BIG PRODUCTIVITY through what could otherwise be the dreariest part of winter.  To help you get ready, I’m re-posting a blog from previous years about how to get ready and set workable goals: ****************************** One of my favorite parts of the Ruby Slippered Sisterhood’s Winter Writing Festival is the fact that you can set your own goals. You decide what you need to do to earn one point, and...

Announcing the 2019 Winter Writing Festival!!

The holidays are over, but we bet you could use a special gift for your writer self! The Rubies have one for you: THE NINTH ANNUAL RUBY SLIPPERED SISTERHOOD WINTER WRITING FESTIVAL STARTS THURSDAY JANUARY 10, 2019!!!

If you’ve joined us for the Winter Writing Festival any time during the past eight years, you know it can be a tremendously productive time, with lots of inspiring support and the magic of REGULAR WRITING SPRINTS held in our cozy Ruby Chat Room!!

It’s completely free, and all wri...

New Year, New Dream

Happy New Year! Do you have things you want to accomplish in 2019?  Reading goals?  Writing goals?  Life goals?

I love a new year – the chance to restart a challenge to ourselves that we may have fallen short of completing in the past, the opportunity to renew our dedication, reassess and see where we stand and where we want to go.  That last part is my favorite.  To think about where we want to go.  To restart our dreams.

It can be all too easy to get bogged down in what we wish we had alre...

Getting the Happy Back

I’ve observed something over the past year. Very few authors seem to be happy with their careers. That unhappiness manifests itself in different ways when the subject of writing careers come up. Sighs. Rolled eyes. Or out and out discussion of their frustrations.

In each case, much of the discussion ends up revolving around the things we can’t control – the market, publisher decisions, overall sales, Amazon platform changes/modifications/gaming-the-system issues, and saturation in the market....