Dear Writer

In this month's Talking Shop episode, Sarah reviewed Episode 7 and 8 from the lecture series Writing Great Fiction - The Mechanics of Dialogue and Integrating Dialogue into Narrative. Ashley reviewed chapter four of The Writing Experiment – Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing By Hazel Smith which was about using already existing texts to inspire new literature.

This week we talked to Melissa Guyan about her writing journey. Melissa is a New Zealand based indie author. Her work spans a number of subgenres in romantic fiction, with a different penname for each. In YA romance, she goes by Jordan Ford, in romantic suspense she is Melissa Pearl, and in romantic comedy she is Melody Sweet. She also cowrites Christian small town romance under the penname Sophia Quinn. Melissa has published over 80 novels and owns a small press company, Forever Love Publishing. At the end of the show, Melissa discussed her reading challenge. If you would like to take part in this, follow the link here: www.foreverlovepublishing.com/reading-challenge

On this culturing creativity episode, we discussed the power of saying 'no'. Saying no can be a difficult feat to master, yet without appropriate boundaries it can be easy to fall victim to burnout. We talked about whether we find it hard to say no, and some tips and thoughts on how to ease the guilt and free up writing time.

This week, we discuss how to edit the first draft of your novel. Should you let your manuscript rest or start editing immediately? Then, we share our editing checklists and some tips about dealing with Beta Reader feedback.

In this month's Talking Shop episode, Sarah reviewed the second chapter of The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maas which explained the nuances of showing vs telling. Ashley reviewed chapter two of a book called The Writing Experiment – Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing By Hazel Smith which demonstrated a writing technique based on experimenting with different genres.

On our Author Spotlight segment this month, we chatted with Beth D. Carter. Beth is a US based author who writes romance novels about ordinary girls in extraordinary situations. She has been published for thirteen years and released 100+ books in that time. We had a really interesting conversation about the twists and turns in her publishing journey, and she shared some invaluable writing advice and editing tips.

On this Culturing Creativity episode, we try our hand at making mood boards for some of the books in our Black Skies Series and discuss how these mood board can help inspire creative thinking. If you would like to create your own mood board, we suggest using milanote at https://milanote.com for an easy online platform.

On this craft episode of Dear Writer, we discussed the importance of story structure when writing your novel, and explored some of the common elements found in different types of narrative structure.

In this episode, Sarah reviewed the first chapter of Crafting Novels & Short Stories: The Complete Guide to Writing Great Fiction by Writer's Digest Books (Editor) which gave handy tips about how to organize your writing life. Ashley explored an article called Fantasy World Building: The Power of Detail by C.S. Pacat from the the journal Writing Queensland which looked at how the addition of small details to your setting can make your novels feel more real.

On our Author Spotlight segment this month we chatted with M.K. Stabley. She is a US based author who writes cozy mysteries with a paranormal twist. She has two series, The Eva St. Claire Mysteries and The Alexa Vandagau Mysteries. The next novel in her Eva St. Claire Series will be released in August. When she's not writing, she's talking about writing on her podcast, The Talking Book Podcast. We had an engaging conversation about her writing process, her inspiration, and her writing journey so far.

On this culturing creativity episode, we talked all about developing a healthy writing mindset. We explored what a 'writing mindset' is, why it's so important for your writing, and how to work out an approach to writing that is suited to your individual circumstances.

This craft episode was devoted to the art of creating emotion in your characters and in drawing out emotion from your readers. We discussed tips and tricks we use to engage readers by creating realistic emotion-driven scenes, and why the reader's emotional connection to the characters is important.

On our author spotlight segment this month we had a wonderful chat with Julie Higgins. Julie is a mystery/thriller writer based in the UK. Her debut novel, Finding Ruby, was released in 2019. The sequel, A Long Time Burning, is a Christmas mystery that will be released near the end of this year. We had an engaging conversation with Julie about the process of writing mystery novels, her inspiration, and her writing journey so far.

On this craft episode of Dear Writer, we discussed how to weave backstory into your novel, and why it is important, especially when it comes to the craft of character and relating to your readers.

We introduced two more writing resources on this talking shop episode. Though both articles we chose were more directed at instructors of creative writing classes, they were enlightening and thought-provoking reads. Sarah explored an article called "Writing Here, Writing Now; Making Sense of It All: Examining Cultural and Historical Context in the Introductory Creative Writing Class", by Oindrila Mukherjee. Ashley examined an article called "Before the First Draft: Cultivating Inspiration and Creative Insight in the Classroom", by Brandi Reissenweber. You can find both articles here: https://scholarworks.rit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1261&context=jcws https://scholarworks.rit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=jcws