Rani Divine's Blog, page 10

Listen to the Experts: Show, don't tell

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. As you know, it’s the last week of April. And also the first partial week of May… so we’ll be finishing up our series on editing, this week! And I have two things to talk to you about. Two sides of a coin, as it were, because both sides deserve some merit, if you ask me.
I sincerely hope that you’ve had as much fun as I have this month, and that you’ve learned something or maybe even found a way to connect with writing or editing as a whole, as we’ve explored everything this month. If there’s anything you’d like me to go into more detail with, be sure to drop a comment and let me know! For now, let’s get into the good stuff.
Listen to the Experts: Telling, not showing
It’s one of the first things you hear when you start writing and ask any writer for advice. How do I do this and do it well? They’ll all say, “Show, don’t tell.” And they’re right. The vast majority of the time, readers would much rather be shown a story than told a story.
What’s the difference?
I can tell you a story fairly simply, like so: Jack went to fetch a bucket of water. When he reached the well, it was dry. He came down very sad, and very thirsty, but he learned to never trust that water will always be at the bottom of a well.
Showing it, on the other hand, takes much more finesse: Parched of thirst, Jack stumbled over the rough, cracked ground toward the old water well. The sun beat hard upon his back, parching him evermore by the time he reached the shade of the dilapidated well. He cast the bucket, rusted and burning with heat, down into its depths, but only silence greeted him from the bottom. He’d thought certain he would find water here. Where could he go now, with the well gone dry? Quiet sobs tore through his heart as he collapsed against the failing bricks, all hope now lost.
See the difference?
Well, that’s what you need to look for in your manuscript, while you’re editing. You need to look for moments in time that are important, that are necessary to move the story forward, to connect your readers to your characters, to add emotion or tension to pivotal scenes, and make sure that you’re showing and not telling.
It happens to the best of us, that we skip over the showing and start telling when we have something more interesting on the horizon, but it’s your duty as a writer (now wearing your editor hat, of course) to make sure those moments are few and far between. You owe it to your readers, to show them a story, to allow them to be a part of this story. Don’t just tell them a fairytale, don’t just try to give them a moral lesson in as few words as possible. And train your eye to find the moments where you’re telling, so you can make sure you show instead.
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Let's Set the Scene: How much exposition is necessary, anyway?

Hi everybody! Welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by. All month long, we’ve been talking about editing. We’re talking about those dreaded first drafts, that horrible first round of editing, and all the things we have to train our eyes to find when it comes to those edits. We’ve talked about everything from plot holes to grammar and sentence structure, and this week, we’re going over the things that I think can take the longest to learn. If you haven’t checked out Tuesday’s post yet, be sure to do so!
For today, let’s talk about…
Gratuitous Exposition
As you know, Tuesday we talked about the opposite: dialogue. Those are the two types of writing you’ll have in your manuscript. You’ll have dialogue, and you’ll have all that other stuff. And, like we discussed on Tuesday, dialogue tends to be what draws a reader’s eye—because of that, we need to make sure we’re not overusing our exposition.
Where dialogue needs to be pointed and necessary, where dialogue draws the eye and allows readers to get to know characters a little bit better through their word use and actions during speech, exposition is the filler. It’s where readers find the real story, where readers discover through sight, smell, taste, touch, and feel. It’s where we writers get to introduce emotion and feeling, where we get to explore every little thing and show every tiny detail we’ve discovered about this world we created inside our writer brains.
And that’s also why we need to watch ourselves, and make sure we don’t overdo it.
I’ve been known to overdo it. I’ve been known to have to go through and cut down on my exposition, because I’ve described the same tree five times in two pages, and I know my readers just won’t care that much about this one specific tree. I’ve also been known to spend too much time in a single character’s head, to focus in on them and allow them to go down the rabbit hole of thought that so many people go down a million times throughout the day—and I know for a fact that nobody really wants to read that.
Just like with dialogue, exposition needs to have a reason. The only difference in how much exposition you’ll need to cut and keep lies in your genre, if I’m being honest. If you write thrillers, then you’ll probably want to limit your exposition. You won’t need to describe as many things as much as you’ll need to precisely use your exposition to maintain the tension of the story. On the other hand, if you’re like me and you write sci-fi or fantasy, then you get creative license to describe things a little bit more. If you’re making a whole new world out of nothing, your reader will want to be able to see it, to touch it, to make sense of it. So you’ll get to take that extra time to reproduce the vision you see in your head.
It all comes down to genre, yes, but the point will always stand: if you have too much exposition, your reader (especially if you market to the US) will get bored, and may put the book down. We don’t want that. We want readers to love our stories as much as we do.
That’s why we edit them so much, before they hit the shelf.
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Shut Up: Knowing when your writing has too much dialogue

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. First of all, I hope you all had a wonderful weekend, and that you enjoyed your Easter Sunday. I got to spend the day playing board games with my family, which was so much fun (I won Catan!). I also want to wish a happy birthday to my mum, even though it’s a day late and I got to spend all day yesterday with her anyway. She’s such an amazing person, a fantabulous mother, and I love her oodles and caboodles (you would too, if you knew her). So, happy birthday, Mum!
And now that I’ve spent too many words on my intro, let’s talk about…
Gratuitous Talking
As you know, we’ve been spending this month talking about editing our first drafts, polishing them to a lovely shine, and training our eye to find things that just don’t belong. This is one of those things.
There are times, in our writing, where we use dialogue as a crutch. There are times when, to move the story forward, we have our characters have a conversation that no one would ever have in a million years, just to get the story to be where we want it. And you need to train your eye to find those times, and remove them.
Personally, I’m also guilty of adding dialogue for the sake of my word count. I generally try to make my scenes even lengths with each other (or work it out so each chapter ends up around the same length), but sometimes this means that I need a few extra words here or there to make the scene match or fulfill the length I need from it... and I tend to use dialogue for it. 
Don’t do that. Don’t be me. Because I always have to go back in and cut it, and for some reason I still haven’t taught myself to just not write like that in the first place.
Dialogue is one of those things that draws people’s eye. If there’s dialogue on the page, a lot of readers (myself included, sometimes) will skim the exposition before it just to get to that piece of dialogue. Often forgetting that to make sense of that dialogue, we need to read the exposition… but that’s beside the point.
Point is, your dialogue needs to have specific meaning within it. It can’t just be there to be there. Dialogue has to have a sharper meaning, a specificity to it that exposition doesn’t necessarily need to have at all times, because dialogue will draw the eye of your reader, and it needs to be pointed. It needs to be necessary.
I know, I know, some of those conversations your characters had were really fun and helped you to get to know your characters—but does that dialogue need to be there, the way that it is right now, in order to move the story forward? If not, then it might not need to be there (of course, if it’s a pivotal way for your reader to get to know your character, then it might actually need to be there, too—but you know, it could also be moved or split into a few scenes, couldn't it?).
There’s a delicate balance, as with everything else in editing. You need to train your eye to find what’s necessary, to see what pieces of dialogue you need and what ones can be cut. And the more you do it, the easier it becomes.
Me? I’ve gotten to the point where I cut dialogue like crazy, because it’s not doing much of anything in the story.
You’ll get there too. You will.
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Saying Goodbye: Knowing when and how to cut a character

Hi guys, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. This month, we’ve been spending some time talking about editing. We’ve been discussing those dreaded first drafts, and all the things we need to train our eyes to find when it comes to editing all those words we’ve finally finished compiling into a full manuscript.
I, of all people, know how stressful it is to do this one. I know how hard it is, I know how awful it feels when I have to do it, and I know how dreadful that moment is, when you realize it has to be done.
Unnecessary Characters
You knew this one had to be coming, didn’t you? Of course you did. Every so often, there’s a character written in the first draft, who really doesn’t need to be there. A character who’s… well, they’re just unnecessary and need to be cut from the story.
Not a fun thing to do. I know it. You know it. But it does need to be done, from time to time. In fact, I’ve had it happen four or five times. It never gets any easier. Ever. I might go so far as to say that it gets more difficult, honestly, because it’s such a pain to do—and it’s always hard to say goodbye to a character we’ve already spent so much time with.
But how do we know when a character is unnecessary?
I’ll tell you, using the best example I have: Vyria, from Mynidd: People of the Hills.
If you’ve read this book, I’m sure you’re thinking, “But Vyria's barely in that book!” And you’d be right. That’s because she was unnecessary, and at the last minute, I cut her from the manuscript (almost completely, to the point that she only has a name because sentences would've been awkward if she didn't).
She was a Mynidd character, if you hadn’t guessed. I’d designed her to be the character who most interacts with humanity, the character who first meets Aeronwen and the brothers, the character who would be pivotal in the Mynidd’s attempts to bring humanity into an understanding of the Vartes. Somehow, in all those pages, she turned into a weird little character who hardly did anything and was always thinking more than acting. She was always there, always in the background, but she didn’t do much. In fact, everything important she did could easily have been done by another character: Nywinn. You’ll all know her name, I trust, if you’ve read the book.
Nywinn is a protector of the Mynidd, a stronger character than Vyria was, and a much bigger personality on the page than Vyria could ever have hoped to be. But I loved Vyria so much that it wasn’t until near the end of editing that I realized I’d goofed with her, that she really didn’t need to be there at all.
It’s probably one of the most difficult things to do as an editor, to cut out a character but maintain some of their scenes using a different character. I know, because I’ve done it. Because Vyria and Nywinn ended up molding into a completely new character, a character now named Nywinn, who turned out far better than either of them could’ve done on their own.
And that’s why we do it. Our story is stronger, if we don’t have characters who just stand there and do nothing. If a character has a name, they need to have a point, a reason for being there. Otherwise they’re just another name to draw reader’s attention away from the information at hand. That’s really the last thing we need.
[love]
{Rani Divine}

A Learning Process: What needs to be in my manuscript, anyway?

Hi guys! Welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by. For those of you who came to Gallup over the weekend for the library’s author fair, thanks so much for coming out and showing your support! We got to name our number one fan over the weekend, and had so much fun meeting lots of you.
All month long, of course, we’ve been talking about things you need to be looking for while you’re editing your first draft. We’re focusing on the first draft because the first draft is always the hardest to edit, because… well, let’s face it, the first draft is always a mess.
Today, let’s talk about a big one: Unnecessary Information
Now, this is hard to quantify, yes, but it’s one of those things that you’ll have to get used to finding, while you’re editing. There’s always text that doesn’t need to be there, story parts that don’t move anything forward and don’t really do anything at all in the story in general. It’s important, while you’re editing your first draft, that you find as much unnecessary information as possible and cut it from your manuscript.
I’ll say it again, because I feel the need to say it all the time: keep a copy of your original, so you’ll never have to dread cutting something you loved writing. You’ll always have a copy of it for you, even if your fans never get to read it. Your writing, first and foremost, is for you. I know many people will say that you’re writing for your fans, that you’re writing for your readers, but let’s be honest. You write because you feel the need to write, because there’s something in your soul that says you need to be writing. So always keep a copy of your very first draft, unedited, so you can come back to it anytime you want.
When it comes to finding unnecessary information, of course, there are a few questions I always try to ask myself:
Does this need to be said? Does this need to be said, in this way? Does this need to be said, in this way, in this timing?

If you’re a Craig Ferguson fan, you might know where I got those questions from. It was probably the one thing that stuck with me, from everything I ever heard him say.
The point stands, however. These three questions help point you in the right directions, so you’ll be able to tell what sections of your writing need to be there and what sections are fine to delete or move to a different section of the story. There are always pieces of information that can be moved from one area to another, sometimes to be delivered far more smoothly.
Hard to conceptualize? Yes. But if you start asking yourself these questions while you edit, you’ll get the hang of it.
That’s what it’s all about, in the end: getting the hang of it, getting better at it, and figuring out what pieces of your story need to be there and what ones don’t.
It’s all a learning process, and you’ll get better at it as time goes on. I promise.
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Stay Focused: Finding those little errors that annoy your readers most

Hi guys! Welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by. :) As you surely know, this month we’re talking about doing those dreaded edits on our precious first drafts.
We’ve been discussing the grammatical fixes and some of the big fixes, and now it’s time to get into one of the more difficult ones. This one, in fact, is one that takes so much focus that you probably won’t find all of them the first time through. You’re more likely to find them on the second or third time through your manuscript, or even during the final stages of editing—all because they’re so hard to locate that we don’t always see they’re there (and yet for some reason, readers always find them in a single read-through).
Continuity Errors (Sometimes called “small plot holes”)
Where the big holes we talked about the other day are large, straight up *holes* in the plot, these are those little details that point out the fact that this story isn’t real. And they’re a pain in the behind to find and remove, if I’m being honest.
Essentially, these are the errors for which you’ll have to be paying complete and utter attention to what you’re doing. These are the reason why you can’t be lax while you’re editing, why you can’t let your concentration slip for even a few minutes. Why? Because these errors are silly, small, and very important to remove—and because by leaving them in, your story looks sloppy and like you probably don’t really know what you’re doing.
None of us wants that.
In fact, it’s highly likely that a few of these will remain in your story, even when it’s published. And it’s highly likely that these will annoy a few of your readers. But, it’s also highly likely that if you’re doing your job right, many readers won’t even notice these oopses.
But how do we find them in the first place? That’s simple, but not very easy. You’ll have to read your manuscript more than once, during your first round of edits. You’ll probably have to read it so much that you won’t want to read it anymore, that you’ll be tired of it and don’t really want to publish it now anyway. Or you’ll just know it like the back of your hand and will know how to answer any question your readers pose to you. Either option is likely. Either option is completely reasonable. Either option ends in a desired way: you know your story, and you know you’ve fixed as much as you can.
All this to say, while you’re editing, I need you to be paying attention. Your story needs you to be paying attention, to be watching closely and overseeing every single piece of text within its pages. You owe it to your story, to put in the work.
Find those little tiny errors, those offhanded remarks, phrases, and statements that break what’s going on in the story. And then remove them.
Nice thing is, these are usually so small that the fix is as easy as can be.
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Know your story: Finding plot holes before they ruin your life

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. All month long, we’re talking about editing. After all, it’s half of what you do, when you’re a writer. Half of your life is about writing, and the other half is about editing. Okay, well maybe it doesn't take up your whole life, but sometimes it sure does feel like it.
Being that I’m up to my neck in edits for the finale of the Druid Novels, I thought this would be a fantabulous time to have some chats about editing, and what you should be looking for while you’re editing your first draft. I think that first edit is the hardest one, don’t you? There’s so much to look for, so much to check for, and so many things we have to go back and double check all the time, just to make sure everything is working the way it’s supposed to. The next round is much, much simpler.
Today though, let’s talk about some of the bigger things we need to keep our eye out for.
Big Plot Holes
Of course! We know this. There are always plot holes in first drafts. It’s nearly impossible not to have a plot hole, when it comes to a first draft. They’re always around, lurking in the shadows, making our lives difficult when we start editing…
And yes, you should be training your eye to find things like this—before you yourself realize that it might be a plot hole.
Remember when we talked about not generally remembering every single thing that you write? Well, that becomes the bane of my existence while I’m checking for plot holes, because I do it by trying to remember as much as I can about the story. They stick out like a sore thumb, if you remember your story well enough. Those that don’t stick out… well, they’re harder to locate. We’ll get to them in a bit.
The bigger plot holes are, a lot of the time, easy to spot. They’re a character being in two places at once, a thing that happens at one point in the story and happens again later on, a phrase that’s out of place and changes the whole meaning of your story’s ending—the list goes on and on, and if you know your story well enough, you won’t have difficulty finding them.
Thing is, a lot of those big plot holes are made via scenes that we actually really like. This tends to be a problem I have, while I’m editing. I come across a scene that I love, only to have to cut it because it creates a hole in the story I’ve so carefully crafted.
Well, it has to go. But I’ll keep a copy for myself, won’t I?
Plot holes, as we all know, are one of those things that readers can spot a mile off. They find a hole and they’ll shout down to the bottom just to hear the echo and alert everyone in the vicinity to the fact that there’s a hole in this story and the author didn’t notice before it got published. It’s annoying. In fact, it’s sometimes downright terrifying, when we draw near to publication day. And that’s why you need to learn how to spot them now, while you’re nowhere near publishing, while all you’re doing is running through a round of edits on a first draft.
Train your eye to find the things that don’t belong, to search for portions of the story that you just don’t remember being there nearer the end of the book. Remember the things you wrote, remember the story you loved while you were writing it, and you’ll have a much easier time of this.
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Better be reading: Knowing how much detail to include

Hi guys, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by, as we continue our month-long series on editing, and what to look for while you start editing your manuscript. For most of us, editing isn’t the fun part, when it comes to writing a book. It’s the complex part, the part many of us dread. And so I wanted to take a little time and make a list for you, of things you should be looking for while you edit your first draft. Besides, once you get good at training your eye to find them while you’re editing, you’ll get better at not writing a lot of these things in the first place.
Let’s get started, shall we?
Over-Explaining Simple Things (or Under-Explaining Complex Ones)
This is one of those things that’s hard to quantify, if I’m being perfectly honest. It’s hard for me to say what’s over or under-explained. But you should have a pretty good idea of this, if you’re a reader (which you should be, if you’re a writer). Sometimes, we writers just give a bit too much information about the simplest of things, or just don’t give enough information when a complex thing happens, or when a complex idea is presented.
Try not to do either of those.
If your character is walking down the street and it’s not an important scene in which he or she is walking down the street, then don’t spend much time on it. Just have them walk down the street. Maybe don’t even mention it at all. But if their walking down the street will be a pivotal moment in their thoughts, then certainly take the time to drag it out and explain a little more of what they’re seeing and what’s going through their mind while they walk.
It’s a delicate balance, and one you should get yourself well acquainted with.
I’ll explain it like this:
Simple things, like a simple handgun, perhaps a Glock, don’t need to be explained or described as more than that. We know what a Glock is. Anybody who watches television knows what a Glock is (or at least has a vague idea of what one is). On the other hand, a sonic death ray… I have no idea what that might look like. I don’t know what it is, or what it does (aside from, probably, killing people?). So take the time to explain what your death ray is, what it looks like, and what it does. It’s a matter of knowing what your readers already know, and what they don’t—always keeping in mind that they don’t have the same imagination you do. But it's also a matter of knowing when to insert a lot of detail, and when to hold back. Again, you'll have a better idea of how to do this based on what books you read.
Train your eyes to look for things like that, to look for moments when your readers may need more detail, and moments when you’ve probably given too much. And then take the time to fix the problem. Tone down your descriptions, when necessary. Amp them up, when you need to. Find the balance for your story.
And remember, above all, do not listen to anyone outside your genre, when it comes to advice about explanations and descriptions.
Don’t do it.
These things work differently across genres, and I don’t want you taking advice from someone who writes a completely different kind of world than you. Thriller writers cannot advise fantasy writers. Romance writers cannot advise those who write horror. There's a reason for that. Staples do not always cross genre, nor do scruples and general writing rules, a lot of the time.
Trust me; it’s better if we stick to our own genre, for things like this.
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Training the eye: What to look for when you start editing

Hi guys, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by. I had a lot of fun last month, telling you guys a bit of what goes into writing a series of standalone novels—and this month, I’ve decided to talk about editing.
The ins and outs of editing, what you need to look for while you’re editing, and what you need to train your eye to find throughout your editing process. Really, that’s a lot of what editing is. It’s training your eyes to find the errors, even when your brain doesn’t necessarily want to see them. After all, your brain knows what you wrote, and knows what your sentences are meant to say. So it’s your eye that needs to find the errors, without too much effort (or else editing may give you a literal headache).
Today, we’ll look at the most basic of things you need to train your eyes to find: Grammar, Word Usage, and Sentence Structure
Obvious, yes? But these are some of the hardest things for your brain to find. Like I said, your brain knows what that sentence is supposed to say, and so automatically reads it the way it was meant to be read. Your eye must therefore be trained to read the sentence no matter what, and spot the errors within it.
Let’s start with Grammar.
If you’re not good at grammar, then I suggest you learn. Most editors won’t touch a book until you’ve been through it at least once yourself—primarily because we editors don’t want to have to fix allllllll your silly grammar mistakes the first time we read through your manuscript. We’d much rather be able to focus on the big things, the plot points and the story changes that need to be made, than checking to make sure you’ve written your words in the right order.
If it helps, use your spellchecker. Sign up for Grammarly or some similar program to help you spot the errors in your writing. The more you’re drawn to the errors in your grammar, the less you’ll write them in the first place.
Word Usage
I mention this one primarily because we, as writers, tend to get in a rut. We have our favorite words, and we like to use them as much as we can—as often as we can. But there are certain words that draw reader’s eyes in a weird way, in a way that says, “I don’t see that word very often, that’s cool,” until they’ve seen it eight times in a ten page span in your book and start wondering why they've seen it so often.
Train your eye to scan for words you’re using too much, words you might be overusing—especially the ones that draw the eye. For me, it’s words like “myriad.” I love that word. I’d like to use it a lot more than I do. Unfortunately, it’s one of those words that’s not said aloud a whole lot, and so readers start to notice a pattern if it’s written more than a few times in an entire book.
Your eye must know to look for things of this nature. Look for repetition of the words "of" and “that,” both in everyday speech and in your writing. You’ll be surprised, how much it’s overused.
Sentence Structure
This one is the bane of my existence, and I’m still working on it. Vary your sentence structures, please. Don’t write the same sentence over and over, using different words. Try new things. Add fragments and run-ons when necessary. Try not to bore your reader by using the same structure time and time again.
I’ve gotten to the point now that I can find them. I can see when I’m repeating similar sentence structures and need to fix it. The hard part is knowing how to fix it. I'm still working on that.
And that part, my dear writer, is on you, too.
[love]
{Rani Divine}

The best of intentions

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. All month long, we’ve been going over the ins and outs of writing your very own novel series. But not just any series. No, we’ve been discussing book series’ comprised of standalone novels, like what I’ve done with my druid series. We’ve talked about your motives behind writing a series like this, and we’ve gone over some of the traps and pitfalls associated with writing standalones within a series as a whole—and today, I want to talk to you a little more about you and your motives.
See, your series is a part of you. It was born from you, regurgitated from your soul onto the page, and so I know this part matters a lot to you.
I know, because it mattered a lot to me, too. And because of that, I’m going to approach it from a different angle.
Release Times
I know, I know, I said I was going to talk about you and your motives—and I am!—but you’ll have to bear with me. Remember, a couple sentences ago? We’re taking a unique angle here.
There are two kinds of writers, when it comes to those who release series’ comprised of standalones. There are those who want to get the whole thing written before they start releasing the books and there are those who will get a basic outline done and just start releasing as the books are ready to go.
You know which one I am. But which one are you?
It’s an important question, and one I challenge you to answer beforeyou get too far into your series. I want you to know your intentions, with your story. I want you to know what you’re anticipating from this, what you’re hoping for, what you expect when it comes to releases. I want you to know how much effort you plan on putting into each book prior to release, and how much attention you can give your series before the books start releasing.
I want you to know this, because your readers need to know this.
From the time the first book comes out, especially if it’s not the chronological first in the series, everyone who picks up your book will be asking when the next one comes out. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We all do it. If we pick up a book in a series, we just want to know when the next one will be out. We want to know that we’re covered, in case we really like this one and just can’t seem to put it down.
And you, dear writer, need to know (and be okay with the fact) that some readers won’t pick up your book, simply because it’s part of a series. At the same time, others will, because it’s a series. And at the very same time as those, still others will love the fact that it’s a standalone novel that’s still part of a series, so they can just read this one book, but know they can come back for more if they want to.
You need to be okay with all of those, and you need to know which one you’re targeting.
See how this is all about you, now?
The release is all about you, all about figuring out what you want from your series, what you expect from it, who you intend to reach with it.
I want you to think long and hard about these things, before you start publishing.
Why? Because I didn’t do that, and I really wish I had. There’s a part of me that wishes I’d waited just one more year before I started releasing the Druid Novels, just so I’d have more time to make things line up properly. They’re fine, I know. Everything’s working, there are no major errors anywhere. But there are little ones that I’ll be fixing in the second print runs, and I wish it hadn’t come to that. I really do.
So I want you to think all of this through, before you start publishing. I want you to think everything through, know what you want, and know what you expect. I want you to have the story at least mostly figured out, before you start releasing.
And I want you to have fun with it—because it is fun. But it’s also one of the greatest challenges your writer brain will ever experience, I swear.
Be sure to pop back in next month, to find out what our April theme will be!
[love]
{Rani Divine}