Venessa M. Giunta's Blog, page 3

Quick Edits: A Look at “Show Don’t Tell”

Quick Edits is a short feature where I give quick editing advice on how to handle common problems in fiction writing. Show Don’t Tell In my capacity as an editor, I’ve written “This is telling. I want to experience this with the character, not be told about it,” countless times. And the soundbite is “Show, don’t tell.” We’ve all heard it. But the problem with soundbites is they’re meant to be short, so if we embrace them as rules, rather than guidelines, we lose the nuance. “Never use adverbs...

Conventions 101, or How Not to Get Killed by Cons

I’ve decided to republish the series of posts about conventions and convention life that were originally published over at Speculative Chic. Incidentally, the post below was my very first column on SpecChic, published on August 11, 2016! You can find the original post here. I’ll be republishing these monthly over the rest of the year (or until I run out

Quick Edits: Don’t Blink

Quick Edits is a short feature where I give quick editing advice on how to handle common problems in fiction writing. Don’t Blink We’ve all read it. Some of us have probably written it. Some surprising thing happens. And, in response, a character blinks. This is a problem. Why? Because blinking is not an indicator of surprise. If it were, we would be indicating surprise more than twenty five thousand times in a day. Blinking is a mostly involuntary bodily action. It happens all the time. In f...

Diving Into Indie Publishing

So I write smut under a pen name. It’s a loosely guarded secret. But my secret isn’t why I’m telling you, Lovely Reader. I want to talk this week about indie publishing. The book I’d published under my pen name was originally done by a medium-sized ebook publisher that has recently closed its doors, so the rights reverted back to me. Rather than looking for another company, I decided to self-publish the old book, along with a new short story and a second book in the series once it’s complete...

Tool Time Tuesday: NaturalReader

About once a month, on Tuesday, we talk about the different tools available for writers to make life easier (theoretically