Hey guys! I just got the great news that I won a copy of The Fourth Stall by Chris Rylander over at Tracy Edward Wymer’s blog. While I’m thrilled about winning the book, it’s going to an important cause: Getting kids to read! Tracy’s whole contest was geared toward getting it into the hands of…
Read more Random Post of Awesomeness: Braggin on a Buddy and…Me!
For all you NaNo folks out there – stop reading this and get to writing! And good luck. But I do want to talk about NaNo for a second, because I think it serves a fantastic purpose: getting people to write. It wakes up those muscles that some writers need to get to it. Then…
Read more Yet Another NaNo Commenter
First off, a big ole congrats to Julia — the Boudreau Birthday Bash Contest winner. It’s kind of crushing to know that I was so close to her word count and bathroom construction took over that last day. (I’m sorry, I love writing, but I love my bathroom too…and you don’t know what you have…
Read more Contest, Alexie, and Others
Normally, I’m a handwriter. But, after my last word count contest bobber where John kicked my tail, I figured something out: For writing contests, one should not handwrite everything and then try to type it in. Turns out, when you try to do that, you just wind up writing twice the words — but the…
Read more The Typing vs Handwriting Thingy
It’s such a shame that the word count contest only counts for one project — since the profs seemed to have teamed up and assigned terms papers all in this last week. Blech.
Read more Words, Words, Words
My ultimate grand prize for the Nathan Bransford contest was one of the following:1. A query critiqe2. A partial critique3. A 10-minute phone conversation/dish session They’re all tempting prospects. But! My query is getting results at the moment, so I’m not feeling inclined to send it in unless I’m actually query-ing. Plus, I don’t think…
Read more Picking Prizes
Yay! I finished a book today! The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Finally, something to review on Goodreads. I’m also pretty close to finishing up my re-read of Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, our current mentor of the month. Last time I read this book, I was thirteen. Around my birthday. Which…
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Friday night, after closing on Thursday evening and then opening on Friday morning, I attended the Fourth Annual American Icon. Didn’t participate in this one–unless you count whooping and hollering for my buds participation. And let me tell you: Deb, Fleur, and John kicked all kinds of butt. Deb conquered her fear and stood in…
Read more Comments from the Peanut Gallery
First off, here is how the contest worked: There were 19 contestants who read either excerpts from book-length pieces or short stories. In as few words as possible they stated who they were, what they were writing and give a log line (what’s your story about?). They had two minutes to read from their work…
Read more Things I Learned from Icon
The only time I’ve ever used dreams in my writing (that I’m aware of) has been for poems, and those were assigned. The basic idea was to transcribe the dream, not interpret or manipulate, and see what happens. Results varied. Last night was weird though. So I’m exhausted, right? (I blame being pregnant.) I go…
Read more Dreaming a Scene