Category: Other Cool Blogs

Other Cool Blogs: Magical Words July 19, 2013

Erin Penn

Sewing Stock Photo

FreeDigitalPhotos.net photo by Carlos Porto

Critique Grief

An adage I have learned as an embroiderer is “as you sew, so shall you rip”. For every stitch that makes it to the final product, two more stitches have been removed. Or so/sew it seems/seams.

With writing comes editing and to get good editing, you have other people whom you have deliberately BEGGED to kill your baby. It hurts. It hurts bad.

Mindy Klasky captured this in “Five Stages of Grief (Critique Edition)” for Magical Words back in 2013. Read it, know it. And for the love of goodness, realize when you hit stage 3 what is happening and do not burn your work. 

(Yes real people do destroy their work. I have seen it happen with friends, amazing, talented friends – poets, authors, writers, calligraphers, artists. Realize it is a STAGE. If you need to burn it, print out a second copy and take that into the backyard and rip it into little, little pieces and light each on fire. Then come back and move to stage four. Please!)

Again the link is here: http://www.magicalwords.net/mindy-klasky/five-stages-of-grief-critique-edition/

Other Cool Blogs: Writing Your Bio

Erin Penn

Bio: Iz Spezial – Luv Mee!

So you need a bio. Could be because you are appearing in a con, publishing a short story in anthology, or actually got your novel accepted somewhere. Maybe you are just setting up your Facebook page, a blog, or website. Could be you have a speaking engagement, displaying some art, or signing up for a dating service.

Anyway, you need to create a short biological sketch. One of the toughest things in the world. You can write 100,000 words of fiction, but writing 100 words of “I done good and is spezial” is tough.

Never fear, Luna Lindsey wrote a great blog on the topic, “Tackling the Dreaded Bio” for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America website. The website has several great blogs including focusing on the “Craft of Writing” and the “Business of Writing”.

Hop on over to https://www.sfwa.org/2016/01/08/35531/ to find out all about writing a bio.

Other Cool Blogs: Magical Words March 16, 2016

Erin Penn

Plotting or Pantsing: Follow the Road or Be Free

Original Image from Unsplash, created by Redd Angelo
Words added by Erin Penn

So I am reading along in the The Weird Wild West anthology by eSpec Books, going through the “about the author” section when I ran across a book title that intrigued me: “The Six-Gun Tarot“. Saw the author was R.S. Belcher and went to read “Rattler”, the short story in the anthology. Not bad, not bad. From there the search went to Amazon to see if the blurb intrigued me as much as the title. It didn’t, but I fooled around a bit (because BOOKS!) and discovered the just released (March 2016) book “The Brotherhood of the Wheel”. Picked the sample up on my Kindle and two days of fighting myself later about dropping money on a new book when I have so many other books to read, write, and edit, I bought the book.

Templar meets Teamsters would be my tagline for the book.

And the next day I run across Mr. Belcher as a new blogger on Magical Words! His “The Great Pants-Plot Comprise” captures one of the many answers to whether plotting (figuring out everything in advance) or pantsing (writing with the flow) is better … and is perhaps the closest to the answer I would provide if anyone asked me how I approached the question.

Flash, which I do a lot of, is a pantsing project; write about 1,000 words quickly. But the novels take a bit more work to be coherent. By nature I am a plotter. Plan life, plan trips, etc. Lists, lists and more lists. Pieces of paper everywhere.

I like the blog because Mr. Belcher tells about two failed novels, one because he approached it from a plotter beginning and the other from a pantsing beginning. Then he found the mix for him. Read about it here: http://www.magicalwords.net/r-s-belcher/the-great-pants-plot-compromise/.

Other Cool Blogs: Magical Words July 14, 2015

Erin Penn


Meme: When you realize your first chapter is nothing but an info dump

First world problems meme from the Internet

Magical Words draws from bloggers throughout the publication industry. Previously I have recommended posts by authors, now one from a content editor. Emily Leverett has assembled several anthologies over the years as the primary editor or supporting editor including The Big Bad and Weird Wild West. This woman breathes words and grammar. And her short stories are lyrical masterpieces.

In the post “What I don’t want to see…”, Ms. Leverett covers what she looks for in an opening paragraph when choosing short fiction as content editor; what is she willing to spend her precious time polishing for publication and making money for both the author and herself.

She then continues that even if you have moved the info dump from the first paragraph to the third – THIS IS STILL NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Dole out your information, do not stop the action.

Full blog is here: http://www.magicalwords.net/really-i-mean-it/what-i-dont-want-to-see/

WRITING EXERCISE: Review the first five pages of your work-in-progress (WIP). Any places where you stopped trusting the reader and started filling in all the holes so they don’t need their imagination?

READING EXERCISE: Read the first page of your present book again – at what point are you immersed in the story? At any point thereafter are you slowed down because the author started an information dump?

Another good blog on info dumping can be found in the NaNo Novel Book Camp at this blog entry: https://ellenbrockediting.com/2014/07/03/novel-boot-camp-lecture-3-how-to-avoid-info-dumping/