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, March 12 The Business of Writing Craft Fiction Freelancing Platform The Business of Writing Query Etiquette Agent Kathleen Ortiz posts some really bad sentences to include in your query letter. Please, follow her advice. How to Decide What Blogs to Read I've gotten a little ruthless in my blog reading, and......
• Writing Roundup, December 11 The Business of Writing Craft Fiction Freelancing Platform The Business of Writing Should Publishers Delay E-book Releases? This was big story this week, as publishers reported that they would try to save paper publishing by delaying important e-book releases. Agent Nathan Bransford explains the flaws in the logic and......
• Writing Roundup, Nov. 6: "Still Friday on the West Coast" Edition The Business of Writing Craft Fiction Freelancing The Business of Writing Firsts What are your goals for your writing career? Aprilynne Pike discusses her goals, other possible goals as a writer, and the ways we can achieve these goals. Choosing Your Genre Agent Jessica Faust covers the issue of......
• Blog Carnivals Blog carnivals can be a great way to introduce yourself to a new group of readers. You can submit your articles to various blog carnivals hosted around the web. Find carnivals at blogcarnival.com. Browse all carnivals, then select a category that matches your blog. Visit the carnivals you find, noting......
• 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.......

• BPA in your water bottle and other noteworthy posts Time I share some link love! And what an exceptional week to do so. I read some great posts that may have you rethinking a...
• Note to Readers: Family Emergency Just a quick note to readers to let you know that my mother has been hospitalized with a very serious, potentially life-threatening condition, which had...
• Festive Link Love Carnivality #10 Welcome to the festive link love carnivality #10 where I bring you my carnival/festival events for the week as well as great articles I found...
• Free PF Blog Hosting Competition One of the more common themes among personal finance bloggers, is most of us have been or currently are, working our way out of debt....
• Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-11-15 Good evening/afternoon/morning twitterers! Hope all is well with everyone # kjwriteleft.com Marks and Angles http://bit.ly/109BPy # Reading:"FreeViral.com -- Free viral traffic for your website", http://bit.ly/41fsn3....