memory thief

Contest Reminder: Name the Characters in My Next Book

A reminder to everyone that there’s a contest going on that ends tomorrow. VODNIK is on sale on Kindle right now for $1.99, and to promote it, I’m giving everyone a chance to name my main character’s parents in THE MEMORY THIEF. How can you win the opportunity to do this? Easy. You get an entry for doing any of the following: Retweeting, blogging, Tumblr-ing, Facebook sharing, LinkedInning, Pinteresting–any social media networking–info on the sale itself. (Might I suggest you include a link to the Kindle book: http://www.amazon.com/Vodn-k-ebook/dp/B007HCVWPQ/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-10&qid=1326202442 Review the book (good or bad–just be honest) on any site (Amazon, iTunes, […]

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Writing Update: GET CUPID and THE MEMORY THIEF

I finished the third draft of GET CUPID on Friday. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s got some issues. Well–it may have some issues. It went from 108,000 words down to a svelte 70,000–just as I’d planned. But anytime you make such drastic changes, it becomes problematic to be able to accurately tell if they were good changes or not. There are some things about the draft that I know are bad. Conflicts that pop up, are emphasized, and then totally forgotten. Characters who are major players at one point, only to all but disappear until the end. I

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Writing Update: The Memory Thief and Get Cupid

Yesterday I finished the second draft of THE MEMORY THIEF, a middle grade contemporary fantasy. It’s off to my agents now to see what their thoughts on the book are at the moment. They saw the first draft and liked it, and this second draft incorporated the changes they suggested, as well as the input I’ve gotten from some alpha readers and my writing group. I cut a fair bit, but I added a fair bit more, bringing the total from 40,000 words to 47,600. The book’s still in rough draft condition, though. What I mean by that is that

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How to Write: Bump, Set, Spike

I’ve been working more on THE MEMORY THIEF–getting close to being done with the second draft. But over the weekend, I’d run into a problem. The book felt good to me–right up to the climax. The ironic thing is that the climax also felt good. But something was off. Something was missing. Everyone who read the climax loved it, but they felt like it hadn’t been climactic in the right way once it was over. In other words, it was *a* climax, but it didn’t feel like *the* climax. This is not how you want your climaxes behaving. So I’d

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What Makes Horror Horrific?

Building off my post from yesterday, I’ve been thinking some about why horror scares us–what it is about it that makes us really frightened. Stephen King wrote a book about a killer clown. Why is it as scary as it is? Part of the reason I’m thinking along these lines is that I’m in the midst of rewriting THE MEMORY THIEF, which I’d like to have a bit more of a horror flair. I’m not writing the next IT, mind you. But maybe something in the vein of Something Wicked This Way Comes, or The Watcher in the Woods. Even

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