One: Thanks to all the blog commenters over the past four days!  We raised $77 for the Berks County Public Libraries.  A complete list of participating blogs is here and many of the challenges are still active - stop by to comment & increase their donation amount, if you can.   Two: After many late nights, the first round of Vision’s [...]

The most surprising thing to me in the publishing process for The Mark was how much editing is done after a manuscript is sold.  As a first-time author, I’d assumed it would just be minor changes – copy edits, maybe tweaking a few plot points – since so much time is spent polishing the novel before submission.  Not [...]

I’ve been waiting for the Publishers Weekly announcement, but since it hasn’t posted yet and the news has already come out in several blog interviews and in chat the other night, I think it’s time to make it official:  Bloomsbury has purchased The Mark’s sequel – working title Vision – for publication in 2011.  I’m so excited [...]

VISION is revised and back with my agent – YAY!   Her suggestions were excellent (as I’ve told her at least twice now), fixing a couple things I thought might need work based on beta readers’ reactions and pointing out some other, new stuff.  It’s funny because she had only a couple very minor changes to THE [...]

#1:  Odd coincidence.  Son’s Word of the Week?  Hoard.  Last book I read?  Dirty Little Secrets, which is about…hoarding.  More about DLS closer to its Feb release, but it’s really, really (really!) good.  #2:  Hush, Hush, the first Tenner book, released last week, debuted at #10 on the NY Times bestseller list, which is all kinds of amazing!  HUGE congrats, Becca!!!! [...]

[Waiting for] the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No “Oh, The Places You’ll Go”, Dr. Seuss I don’t know how much time Dr. Seuss himself spent there, but I’m pretty sure The Waiting Place is chock [...]

After weeks of editing, reading, re-reading, fact-checking and spit-shining, I finally sent VISION, my next book, off to my agent.  She’s going to start reading late next week so, with no edits left on THE MARK and book two outta here, it’s time for a totally guilt-free break from writing.  Happy Labor Day weekend!

Things I learned Saturday morning at the mortuary: -Wikipedia is great as a starting point, but gets a lot of stuff wrong (duh!) -People die 24-7 and the funeral director has to be available to pick up the deceased and, often, begin work on the body immediately, even in the middle of the night.  Many [...]

I still don’t know what’s going on with the stuff outside – my cover – but I did get a look at the stuff inside.  My first pass pages came this week which are the manuscript, formatted and set up exactly the way it’ll look in the printed book.              [...]

I think the guts of a novel can be broken down into three main categories:  Present Action – what’s happening now Backstory/Flashbacks – what’s happened in the past that helps you understand what’s happening now Internal Dialogue – what the characters think about this stuff The problem is that these usually come out in big [...]