The Beginning: The Basics
Aside from the obvious, what is “the beginning”? What does it do? What purpose does it serve? I like to think of the beginning as the introduction. It’s where you introduce your setting, characters, and character goals/conflicts while capturing the reader’s attention and avoiding boring backstory. There’s no [...]
Starting Now: Blogging Basics
I started blogging eight years ago as a way to share information and pictures with my long distance family members. A couple of years after that I created another blog as a way to share some of my stories and songs. It was a couple of years after that before [...]
The Beginning: What Is It?
Before we can look at what makes a great novel beginning, we need to know what that means. Let’s start by identifying the main components of a novel. First, novels typically consist of three main parts: Beginning, Middle, and End. Between each section you have two more major components: the [...]
Hello, May!
It’s official - my sister and her family have their plane tickets for Michigan! What does that have to do with writing? Um, everything! Okay, not really - I’m just super excited (and I will be taking another month off to hang out with them, but more on that later). [...]
Coach and Four: Allisandra’s Tale by Linore Rose Burkard
Nineteen year-old Lady Allisandra is a ward of King Charles II. When he orders her from court to stay with her old friend Elizabeth Hastings, the Duchess of Langley, Allisandra finds herself trapped inside a coach-and-four with the notorious rake Lord Dorchester. Has the duchess betrayed her? Perhaps, but things [...]