Laura Stone's Blog, page 2
September 28, 2015
Why Should Writers Love Libraries?
Here’s a wild tidbit for you, there are more libraries in the United States than there are world-wide McDonald’s restaurants. (The American Library Association says that there are 119,487 of them, and there are 35,000 Micky Ds in the world.) Here’s an even wilder fact for your face: library book sales don’t count towards your book’s ranking […]
On Buying Books and Supporting Authors
The original post I made about this has gotten a lot of wonderful attention on Tumblr, so I wanted to put it here, as well. It’s a good insight into the world of publishing, how you get paid as an author, and how you can build a career. I received the following question a while back: […]
September 2, 2015
Wait, who’s talking?
Dialogue tags. Super important, can be controversial, and can be used in ways that invoke madness. (In me.) We could talk about how you need to cut out using adverbs and how that’s tell, not show, but if you ever want to really get why you shouldn’t use so many dang adverbs with dialogue tags, […]
August 24, 2015
Why you should love the Editing Process
Personally, I love working with editors. I’ve learned more about myself as a writer–and more importantly, how to improve as a writer–through the editing of my two novels than in any other capacity. I’ve heard of writers bursting into tears, of feelings being hurt, and some writers up and quitting the whole shebang from frustrations regarding […]
August 22, 2015
It’s ARC season!
Not Ark, even though I would love 40 days and nights of rain. ARC, or Advanced Reader’s Copy, is the mostly-edited-but-there-still-might-be-a-few-tweaks-left version of a book that is sent out to review houses, book bloggers, and so forth so they have enough time to read and write a review by the time the book is released. If […]
July 13, 2015
Straight (and white) -washing of the Old West
My dad’s side of the family is filled with bona fide cowboys, ranchers and farmers, their established lives out west going back to the late 1840s when my great-great-grandfather converted to Mormonism and took his young bride to the Promised Land. He became a High Priest in Salt Lake City, was a choir master, landed […]
March 11, 2015
Writing Wednesday – On Diversity
Before I fell headlong into my next book project, I mapped out a general outline–as per usual for me–and detailed my Character Bible. This is when I put together the characters obituaries and physical descriptors. (Basically, what would the paper say about them when they’re gone. It’s just a weird thing I do.) I looked at it and […]
March 2, 2015
Why I despise LOLITA (and you can, too!)
This morning the very fun, very talented Beth Wareham posted to Shadow Teams what I’m sure was meant to be a post to get people talking about how most men don’t succeed at writing erotica, with their noted exceptions. [I share the link for context. This isn’t to incite angry comments on either page.] As […]
February 25, 2015
Writing Wednesday – Research
Or as I like to call it, the Sarlacc pit of writing. Don’t get me wrong, I love research. Love love love. My former life as a burgeoning scientist meant nothing but research. And learning? Who doesn’t love learning! Not this gal! *counts the negatives* Uh, you know what I mean. I just often find […]
November 12, 2014
Writing Wednesday – When the words won’t come.
I got a book idea– number 2! –and then promptly shut down. Now, there are some massive emotional upheavals happening in my life currently (to put it lightly) and it would be easy to push my inability to produce a product off onto that. But there are also times when things are mellow and lovely […]
