KELLY J MASSEY

I don't care if you're planning on publishing the traditional route or self-publishing, you need a good editor for both venues. You might ask why, if you're publishing traditionally, you should hire an editor for your manuscript if the big publishing house will already rake its editorial fingers through your piece. You're hunting for an agent, aren't you? Or are you lucky enough to know of a few publishing houses that will look at unrepresented manuscripts? You'll want to put

All right, so last blog post I wrote on whether you should be a pantser or a plotter. What was the verdict? I'm a total panster-I write by the seat of my pants and that works well for me. However, whether you are a plotter or a pantser you should make sure that your work follows a well organized storyline. Otherwise your reader will feel like they are going nowhere fast. Do you know what happens when a reader feels like they aren't getting anywhere? They put your book down an

Time management is crucial for any writer's career. In order to develop our stories and our author platforms we need to make time to concentrate on our creative areas of life. This is where I have been failing as of late. During the fall semester I teach developmental writing for our local community college. Many of the students I receive write at a middle grade level, (think 6th, 7th, and 8th grades). My goal, my objective for the semester is to make them ready to write coll

I will admit it, the title sounds more dire than the actual content of the post. The Minor Character I'm referencing was written into the first draft of my fantasy novel, but in the rewrite she no longer had a place in the story. So what happened? In the rewrite I knew my main characters better, I knew how the storyline should flow. I also knew how to represent the plot line and clues as to future developments without having the dwarven blacksmith. Her previous role had been

I've been introduced to the Hemingway App this week and it is fantastic. (Thank you Twitter for broadening my horizons.) It has also made me acutely aware of how many adverbs I use to describe a character's tone of voice or action. (Or how aware I am of my adverb usage.) It is easy to get started. A writer goes to the web address www.hemingwayapp.com and pastes their prose in the big white box. Since I'm working on a novel I've only pasted up to three pages of manuscript at a