Featured
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My Next Grand Adventure: Moving from Orlando to Newark (and Reinventing My Writing Career)
I decided to leave Writer’s Atelier at the end of June 2024, blissfully unaware that it would be the least ground-shaking change of my summer. It’s not that I wasn’t happy as WA’s “admin.” (“Admin” because, as the founder will tell you, I happily wore many other hats. I invented a good number of them for the fun of it.) I loved the work and believed in the company. That job helped inform who I was as a writer and the role I played in the Orlando writing community, and I was deeply proud of the work I put in. Recently, however, I felt the pull towards story coaching become…
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I Created a Road Trip-themed Word Crawl Game on Dorian to Help You Write a Novel
I feel so lucky for so many reasons. One of them is that I was born during autumn, my favorite time of year. Even better, I was born in November, which is National Novel Writing Month. And this year, I want to give my fellow writers a gift: a unique path to winning NaNoWriMo! First, What is NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is a challenge to write 50,000 words of a brand-new novel during the 30 days of November. The idea is to help creatives stop procrastinating and start writing while cheering each other on through the massive online community that’s grown up around it. There’s just one…
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Why Everything Looks Different Now
Our story begins with a single color. I can tell you exactly how that color came into my life, too: with this very website’s first color scheme, which was based off of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. I thought a mirabelle yellow would pop against the dark, classy red and muted gray-blue I’d also pulled from the painting. Plus, my birthstone is citrine, and if there’s one thing I love to do, it’s adding layers of meaning to make something more beautiful, the same way an oyster adds coat after coat to create a pearl. Now, I’m not one to half-ass anything. I commit, and I committed to my Scheherazade color palette, particularly…
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Read the First Chapter of IN ST. LOUIS WITH YOU
Do you remember In Charleston With You, from all the way back in April of 2021? In Chapter Six of that book, the heroine, Genevieve, mentions her childhood friend who moved to St. Louis before the book takes place. That friend’s name was Katherine, and I’m pleased to tell you her story is next. And boy, is it a story. Since the events of In Charleston With You, Katherine has been widowed. Her husband’s dying wish was for her to marry Lawrence Knightley, their best friend, for financial security, et cetera. Where it gets complicated? Lawrence is in love with her. It’s that aching, haunting kind of love you have for someone…
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Read the First Chapter of THE PRICE OF MAGIC
I think every girl goes through a mermaid phase. Mine was a nice, healthy length, perpetuated by the pool we had while I was growing up, a lifelong love of fairy tales and mythology, and Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Now that I’m older, I do still have a special place in my heart for The Little Mermaid—both the Disney movie and, now, the original tale by Hans Christian Andersen. In particular, I’m drawn to the sea witch. So drawn, in fact, that I finally wrote the little origin story that’d been swirling around in my mind since I was a child. It’s called The Price of Magic, and I’m thrilled…
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How to Enhance Your Reading Experience with Soundscapes
The sister blog post, “How to Enhance Your Writing Experience with Soundscapes,” can be found on Writer’s Atelier. What does your perfect reading experience look like? Maybe you picture yourself curled up on the couch or reading in the great outdoors. Maybe you don’t care where you are as long as you have something warm to drink. Maybe you’ve always been able to read any time, any place, under any conditions. (Lucky!) But what if I told you there was a way to truly immerse yourself in the book you’re reading like you never have before? You can do just that with soundscapes. What are soundscapes? Whether you’ve heard the…
