Sandy Williams's Blog, page 10

Reader Question: Are Editors Supposed to Catch Double Tagging?

In last week’s post Read This If You Want to Be a Better Writer, I talked about Joanna Bourne. who talked about double tagging dialogue, and Shelli asked a good question in the comments.

Are things like double tagging things your editor is suppose to recommend?

I started to reply on that post and realized my answer was running long, so I thought I’d answer it fully here.

It’s a really good question. And it has a short answer and a longer answer.

First answer, I wish!

Longeranswer, not really. By t...

Read This If You Want to be a Better Writer

I’m not directly imparting wisdom here. Instead, I’m pointing you to Joanna Bourne’s blog.

Joanna Bourne might be my favorite historical romance author. She’s at the very least in the top three, and every time I read one of her books, I learn something new. Her descriptions of characters’ appearances, their actions and mannerisms, are all unique and beautiful and profound. Not only that, but she tells a damn good story, mashing together a good romance with a plot full of action and suspense. I...

Finally, a Goodreads for movies? Letterboxd.

You guys know how I’m always lamenting that there isn’t the an movie equivalent for Goodreads? On Facebook last week, one of my awesome online friends (thanks, Renee!) mentioned Letterboxd. Despite my searches for some way to list and review and share all the movies I’ve watched, I’d never come across Letterboxd. But I checked it out, lowering my expectations because I’ve been disappointed time and again with other movie listing sites. Some were too complicated, some weren’t very social, and...

An Artist, I am Not

Every so often, I find myself getting lost when I write. It happened with the Shadow Reader novels. I ended up having to draw a map after creating too many cities for my head to hold, and I drew a sketch of the palace for The Shattered Dark and The Sharpest Blade. I just drew a map for my sci-fi project. Like my hand drawn map of the Realm, this one is hideous. But it serves a function.

Tachyon CapsuleClick to Embiggen

Beautiful, eh? Don’t you love my sketch of the Enterprise and TIE Fighters?...

A Guardians of the Galaxy Review

(I wish I could write a post on my favorite and least favorite movies of 2014, but I can’t even remember half the movies I watched. I’m going to keep a list of them this year, and since no one has yet developed a Goodreads for Movies, I’m listing them on my blog with my general thoughts.)

Guardians of the Galaxy was the first movie I watched this year. It’s been out on Blu-Ray – I rarely go to an actual movie theater – for six months. My husband has been wanting to watch it since the first tra...

Aren POV #2

After the long holiday break (extra long because one of my three-year-olds had his tonsils taken out), I needed to warm up to writing again, so I wrote another snippet from Aren’s POV. This takes place right after the first one, which you can read here. I’m not re-writing the whole trilogy from Aren’s POV; I’m just playing around because it’s fun.

Warning: Unedited writing commences below!

The second the bright white light of the In-Between disappears, I know we’re almost too late. The king’s...

2015: My Goals for the New Year

Hope your 2015 is off to a great start. I’m happy for the new year. I’m especially happy it’s January 5th, because my life can get back to normal. December was a brutal, you guys. I was sick twice, my son’s tonsillectomy was so much more difficult than I expected, and my mother-in-law was in a bad car wreck. Add the holiday shopping and party prep, and I was completely drained at the end of the year.

I’m ready for a restart.

Hopefully, a restart that works better than last year’s. I dug up my “...

Favorite Reads of 2014

Wow, this was a terrible reading year. Not because I read bad books, but because I didn’t read many books at all. Goodreads tells me 18 – my worst year ever – but that number is deceptive.

Fourof the eighteen were novellas.
One was a picture book (I had this terrible idea to start keeping up with the books I read to my kids).
One was a did-not-finish.

So, twelvebooks total. Wow. That’s terrible. And one of my new year goals is to double that number.

But I did read a number of great books.

RECKONING...

Thinking About My Next Project

I finished draft 3 of Shades of Treason a couple of weeks ago. I went through the printed manuscript and made some more mark ups, and once I get those into my file, I’ll send them to a couple of beta readers. While they’re with the betas, I need something new to work on. I’m trying to decide what that will be.

It should be the next book in the Anomaly series. I need to have more than one ready to go before I publish SoT, but my brain feels like it needs a cleanse. SoT was a difficult book to w...

How a Sad Song is a Lesson in Character Development

A radio guy mentioned this artist and this song the other day. I don’t listen to music on the radio often, so everyone and their dog might have heard this already, but it’s new to me, and wow. The tears. I sobbed so much I could barely hear the lyrics. But after listening to it on repeat for a while, I was able to make it through it without too many sniffles, and that’s when I let the extra brilliance of it sink in. Yes, it’s beautiful and moving and pain-filled, but it’s also genius from a w...