Jen's Writing Journey

There have been some great discussions this week on the blogs I follow. Here are a few to get you thinking. Please feel free to share any posts you have come across in the comments section.

Blogger’s Block
It amazes me how I seem to stumble across exactly the words I need to read when I need to read them. I’ve been struggling to come up with topics for both this blog and my pop culture blog, and then this post about breaking through blogger’s block shows up in my inbox. Amazing!

Does Your Story Have Legs?
After pushing the ZZ Top song out of my head, I read this post and got a great idea for dealing with loss of momentum on my stories. (Come back Saturday for more on my own loss of motivation.) Instead of struggling to fill the screen with words, any words, why not set the story aside in a Story Stems folder and begin work on something else. Familiarity breeds contempt, after all, so perhaps a little distance is what you need when hit with writer’s block.

Top Five Things to Look for In Editing Your Rough Draft
Editing and revising can be daunting tasks. Published author Camy Tang provides some good tips to start you along the process. As someone who worked as an editor on a magazine for a number of years, I support all of her suggestions wholeheartedly. In fact, her suggestion to do a find and replace for passive verbs works well for a lot of cleanup, say removing extra spacebar spaces or tabs, the bane of the copyeditor’s existence.

Five Reasons You Should Be Tweeting
You may have noticed that I have added Twitter to my blog. You may also have noticed that I’m not in the habit of using it very regularly. After reading Angela’s post, I am now overcome with Catholic guilt over not tweeting regularly.

The Best Gifts for Writers (PDF)
Women on Writing pulled together a great gift guide for your favorite writer. Use it to buy stuff for writing friends or leave a copy where your partner can find it and get inspiration. Visit their site and sign up for the enewsletter, too.

• Writing Roundup E-reads: Penetrating the Mystery of E-book PricingEver wonder why e-books are priced the way they are? Wonder no more. This article provides an interesting look at pricing models and their basis in print pricing models.IPod Touch, iPhone Join Kindle's Book ClubThe Kindle store is becoming slightly more inclusive by offering......
• How Often to Post? I came across an interesting post about blog frequency, and it got me thinking.I have set up a posting schedule for Pop Culture Curmudgeon--I post three well-thought-out analyses per week plus little bits here and there as the fancy strikes me.But, this blog has been a little harder to schedule.......
• Writing Roundup, August 28 Lots of good stuff out there as we look toward the fall. The Business of Writing How a Book Gets Published Agent Nathan Bransford gives a great, easy-to-follow description of how a book goes from finished clean copy on the author's desk to a shiny new book on the shelves.......
• I'm a Kreativ Blogger I got a wonderful comment on Monday's blog post from Rebecca Emerich, whose blog Living a Life of Writing has been featured in my weekly Writing Roundup quite a few times. Rebecca is a prolific blogger who maintains three distinct blogs and posts on her writing blog daily--even on the......
• Good Resources for Writers I'm test-driving a concept for my Thursday posts: a listing of Websites/blog posts that have some useful info for fledgling and fully fledged writers. Let me know what you think in the comments. Also, point out any good sites or blogs I should be visiting to find content.This week, I'm......

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