Andrea McElwain

This is too good not to share. Agent Jennifer Jackson’s take on how query letters are similar to various Halloween-appropriate creatures: http://arcaedia.livejournal.com/214600.html

I’m still learning when and how I can push myself into writing. I seem to have cycles, times when it’s easy to write and times when it’s very hard. (Hm. I just realized that I should be tracking this, to see if it matches up with anything else.) One difficulty – and I think I’ve [...]

It’s been an interesting week in publishing. I feel like I ought to say something about ebooks or discounted book prices. (For reference, three new ebook readers were announced this week, and big box stores have been in a low-price war over a few bestselling books.) But, really, there’s not much for me to say. [...]

Writing is like practicing an instrument. I remember as a kid I always hated practicing, but when I actually sat down and did it, it was kind of fun. (I have no issues with practicing now. Nope. None at all.) And sitting down to write, getting my hands on the keyboard, is sometimes the hardest [...]

I’ve seen a couple blog posts lately on the subject of dreams and writing. I’ve never written down what little I remember from my dreams, but I probably should, because I’ve woken up from a few thinking that they’d make a really good story. Or maybe a story idea. Dreams – at least my dreams [...]

There are lots of ways to split writers into different categories. Everyone’s different, of course, but there are certain tendencies that people share to one degree or another. Plotters and Pantsers (as in by-the-seat-of), for example. Another that I’ve seen is writing speed. Speed might be the wrong term, actually. It has more to do [...]

There is an interesting contradiction that I’ve seen in myself and that I suspect is also true for many other writers, or artists of one sort or another. On the one hand is a rather inflated ego. I think this is probably necessary for most artists. I mean, really, you need some pretty high self-confidence [...]