Wild Word Friday. I could tell you that our English word HEART (the actual physical heart) comes from the Middle English herte and the Angle Saxon word heorte, which springs from the very ancient Indo-European base word kerd, and that all of them mean HEART. But you won’t find a better definition of HEART than this…
Last week I published my last YOUR Novel post and promised you a list of blogs that will help you sell and market your novel. You’ll find lots of great information about finding an agent, writing queries, book proposals and getting your new “baby” out there in the world in the following blogs. (Next week –…
Wild Word Friday! You have to admit that some of the names of states in the United States are pretty wild, at least in sound and spelling. The name, ILLINOIS – a state in the central portion of the U.S. – is of Algonquian origin. ILLINOIS translates as man – in the sense, “We are men, not deer, not…
YOUR Novel! After all these weeks and months and maybe years of writing, it’s done. Except… For one last rewrite. Really? Yep. Here we go. 1. Print a hard copy of your manuscript. You will catch errors on a hard copy that you miss when you’re reading YOUR Novel on a computer screen. 2. Find…
Wild Word Friday! The elders in our little community often refer to a porch as a STOOP, and, when I hear that word, I visualize the daub-and-wattle huts of ancient times where a hard, swept-dirt pad fronts a small low door. You had to STOOP to get into the hut, and thus the first word for…
It’s very tempting to send YOUR Novel out into the world without a last rewrite for word use and phrasing, but please, after all your hard work, don’t succumb to the temptation to let that baby face the query gauntlet without a “sound check.” I recommend that you read this redux out loud. You will…
One of the first words I learned as young piano student was FORTE. FORTE is an Italian word (pronounced fore- tay) and it means loud. I loved seeing that little word FORTE printed on my music. Kick it in! Pound that keyboard! Permission to be loud? WooHoo! I soon began mimicing the adults in my life by using FORTE in…
As you edit YOUR Novel, you may want to schedule a rewrite with your research in mind. This is pretty much a given for authors of historicals or techno-thrillers. Not so much for those who write contemporary fiction. An intensive research rewrite was always a part of my “redux” for my Alaska novels, but a few…
Wild Word Friday! I’d never heard of the word CHOUSE (rhymes with house) until a month ago when I was browsing through a dictionary, and there it was, important enough to be tucked in its own little dictionary niche. Thus I learned that a CHOUSE is a swindler. Used as a verb, to CHOUSE means to trick…
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get lazy. That’s not always bad. We all need a lazy day (night or evening) to regenerate after hectic times. But when it comes to novels, nothing pops a reader out of YOUR Novel more quickly than a few pages of lazy prose. Ninety-nine percent of the time,…
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