Tag: Writer
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Birthday Freebie – Colouring Pages
I can’t even fathom the words I’m about to type, but A Study of Ash & Smoke turns 5 today. My baby is five years old. How did that even happen? The last few years have been wild. I’ve never struggled to write as much in my life, but the knowledge that I published two…
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Let’s Write Disgust
This addition to the Writing Emotions series is courtesy of Lindsay in Australia (hiya, Lindsay!) who reminded me these posts matter. I chose the topic of disgust because it’s a form of self-disgust (hello, impostor syndrome) that has been keeping me from writing posts like these. If this is your first visit to this series,…
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Let’s Write – Tropes
Ah, tropes. The building blocks of all the stories ever crafted. What’s a trope? Well, those themes and elements we find most often in novels, movies, games, or series. For example, a princess with a mean stepmother. A cop joins the force because their law-enforcing parent was killed in the line of duty (and they…
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Easy Self-Editing – Redundancies (Pleonasms)
The first draft of A Study of Ash & Smoke was riddled with redundancies, AKA pleonasms. My editor, Nerine Dorman, took to my debut manuscript with a kill-it-with-fire vehemence and likely mumbled a million curses at the ceiling as she removed them (among other issues) from my very *cough, cough* unpolished novel. I’ve said this…
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Writing Playlists
My high school art teacher believed music helps us create. She once said you can’t paint sunshine and daffodils while listening to metal, but you needed those angry sounds to paint thunderclouds. And those words have burrowed in my heart. I need music to set the scene while I write. I find it impossible to…
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Updated Planning Methods
Planning a novel doesn’t always come easily. As a hybrid planner/pantser and an ADHD’er, I often find myself super excited at the beginning of the planning process, pouring myself into putting every minute detail to paper. Until the impatience sets in, at which point I must write. Once I’ve abandoned the planning, I hurl myself…
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Let’s Write – Dialogue
For many of us, the ultimate goal is to write good stories that keep our readers submerged in our stories. That’s certainly my greatest motivator whenever I write. But it’s so easy to include quirks that yank our readers right out of our stories and dump them back into the real world. I don’t know…
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March Writing Update
I announced last year that I’m officially back at work on A Curse of Venom & Scales (the story that has been a literal curse in my life). Since then, many of you have reached out to learn more about this book. Friends, it has been a journey. If I’m honest, I’ve never been more…
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How Immigration Influences My Writing
I’ve lived on three continents, in countries with 14 national languages collectively, of which I was fluent in 2 and passable in one. An adventure, people call it. For me, amid the culture shock, those times it felt impossible to adapt, and those wondrous instances of ‘I’m really here, this is really happening to me’,…
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Freebie – Word Count Tracker
I’ve been itching to try a tracker in my bullet journal, but I just haven’t figured out what I wanted to track. Until now. Inspiration struck a few weeks ago, and I’ve been working on a word tracker. But not just any old tracker, it’s a colouring page! The idea is to colour a block…
Yolandie Horak 