I posted my query exercise on Merry Monteleone’s site, which can be found in the side bar. After much good advice, I think I’m getting closer. Agent Kristen, who is also in the side bar, also has a lot of good advice about query letters. My thanks to all the commenters and especially to Merry…

You can’t commit suicide with an electric oven. The oven rack will just put more lines on your face and the heat will frizz your hair. No matter how painful writing a query, pitch or synopsis is, a person has to trudge through it and not take the coward’s way out. Soooo, exactly how does…

Today was an interesting day. Work is still stressing me, but what do you do? I like to eat and not live in a box. At lunch I started thinking about a scene in Paladin. Gen has been poisoned by an assassin’s blade. Her aunt pulls some strings and gets some powerful healers to help…

Dragon Valley-2 Copyright 2004 Julie Weathers-All rights reserved She heard the whirring wings before she saw the burst of color settle between Silverwing’s ears. The horse shook his head impatiently sending black mane, mourning bells and one small fairy dragon into the air. “You know he hates it when you ride on his poll.” The…

There was an interesting discussion about villains on the Compuserve Books and Writers’ forums. What makes a good villain? Do you develop them as fully as you do your protagonist? Do you know their story? Why they do what they do? Are they multi-layered? Are they evil? Truly evil? I bought a writing book called…

We, as writers, have a special brand of demons to live with. Sometimes we read what we have written and smile because we know it really is good. Yeah, it needs tweaking and cleaning up, but it’s damned good. While trying to figure out how to reveal a plot point that comes into play later,…

I’ve been fighting the dreaded pitch process. No, Paladin isn’t finished, but I entered a pitch exercise at Bookends and now I am trying to figure out how to do it well. It should be easy to write a few lines, summing up what the book is about. Well, it isn’t. It doesn’t help that…

Since the pitch process is eating my lunch, I decided to work on something else. I was looking at one of the writer’s forums tonight at the exercises. One of them is optimism and the other is a list of country music titles. The second one isn’t about country music, only using the lines to…

I’ve found one of the best ways for me t stay on track is to make my plans public. This blog is my writer’s declaration. As part of my new beginnings, I decided to make my resolutions public. If you keep tabs on the Writers’ Forum, then you will have noticed a lot of members…

There’s an old saying; no matter how bad you have it you can always look around and find someone in worse condition. Will was out working on his car, when he noticed a man pushing his car down the parking lot of the apartments. The man was at the door pushing it and when it…