Thursday, March 27, 2014

Review: Ruby Red Booty Shorts & A Louisville Slugger by Lexi Ander

Can you say HOT? (and would you look at that cover?!) 4 stars

Ruby Red opens with a steamy sex scene, runs headlong into trouble, and leaves me craving more. Diego and Beck are vulnerable and utterly loyal to each other. It made them very easy to root for. I like the strong bond Diego has with his family, though I found some of the backstory clunky to read.

There's a flashback written entirely in past perfect which gives it the tone of an aside rather than putting the reader deeply into a traumatic situation. I also wanted to see more of why Diego decided to move farther away from family.

Lexi does a great job setting the scene and shifting from a standard contemporary story into one invaded by paranormal creatures. Beings that have always been there, hiding. But Denise, a friend of both Diego and Beck, seemed to be tacked on awkwardly. There's a brief conversation with her at the start, then she shows up mid-way through the story and doesn't interact with Diego at all. Not even a glance in his direction. Diego doesn't attempt to interact with her either despite multiple references to their friendship since kindergarden.

TL;DR: This story grabs by the collar and throws you along. It's fast and hard, just the way I like it. 4 Stars.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Review: A Matter Of Disagreement by E.E. Ottoman

Entertaining afternoon read, 4 Stars

I can always count on E. E. for an uplifting romance and this story had me grinning throughout the hour it took to read. Yet, the craft plays it safe. It's easy to read without changing sentence structure or taking character voice farther with adventurous verbs.

 The characters were solid, their romance (and disagreements!) believable, and the world engaging. I wanted to see more of the mechanical birds. They made a big appearance at the start then played no part in the story in the second half.

 But that's a minor concern when E. E. consistently provides characters finding their way in the middle of the male/female dichotomy. I love the blend of traits that make it clear these people do not identify fully to one side or the other- but somewhere between.

TL;DR: 4 stars. A quick jaunt for a lazy day.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Review: Careful Flowers by Kieran York

A slow build with a satisfying resolution, but lacking in technical skill. 3 stars.

Careful Flowers starts out awkwardly in the middle of a conversation. A case of taking en medias res a little too far. Context arrived quickly but my investment in the story took much longer. I enjoyed the extended supporting cast in this novel, from former hippies to the estranged extended family; everyone was believable and colored the conflict well.

My biggest disappointment in this story came from the craft. Pacing worked well, but the sentences didn't vary much. There's also constant jumping between simple past (I ate food) and past perfect (I had eaten food) that muddied the enjoyment of reading.

I appreciated both the resolution of the mystery and the romantic conflict. I worried that the romantic conflict would resolve by forcing only one party to change rather than compromise from both, and I'm glad to see I was wrong!

TL;DR: 3 stars. This is a solid book with excellent characters, but it's lacking a few style points.

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Review: Song of the Spring Moon Waning by E. E. Ottoman

A lovely short story that left me wanting more. 4 stars.

First, I adore the cover of this book. It's so well matched to the contents and that leaves me so excited.  Second, this is a sweet love story between a eunuch and an intersex person that unfolded so beautifully, I want to know more!

Without giving away any spoilers, I wish there had been more exploration of intimacy between the two main characters. It came up briefly and I don't believe an intense scene like that would fit in the story's current format, but there was much emphasis put on Wen Yu's intersex nature and I wasn't satisfied with what little screen time that received.

However, the main reason I give 4 stars instead of 5 is due to the resolution of the story. The ending is not derived from the character's actions, but would have occurred regardless of the events that unfold from the main character's POV. There wouldn't be a love story, but the major conflict was rendered irrelevant when Mei Hua arrived.

But regardless, the craft of this story is so strong otherwise, and the characters so completely complex, that I would pick up a sequel without hesitation. Also, I just want to sit here and pet the cover.

TL;DR: 4stars. Deus Ex Machnia ending that's almost forgiven by such strong characters.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Review: In His Command by Rie Warren

A dystopian military adventure with a great supporting cast. 5 stars.

Don't let this boring cover fool you. In His Command has a strong military/political clash set in a post-plague dystopian world where homosexuality is a crime against humanity. The main characters are gruff, opinionated, and have more walls than a military base.

The supporting characters in this book do as much to reflect the main characters as they do to move the plot along. Backstories are woven together in this broad net of relationships that is revealed over time, tying people to each other even if they don't want to be.

Romance is the main thread, of course, but the political/personal clash of beliefs is a strong second place contender. Government propaganda, childhood baggage, and military expectation all fight in a wonderful chaos.

I love a great story that doesn't skimp on the erotica and In His Command is exactly that. It took a while for the main characters to figure themselves out, but once they did the sex was hot, heavy, and often. Perfect for the kind of intense men they are.

TL;DR: 5 stars, military/political clash. Hot, hot, hot!

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Review: The Way Home by Anastasia Vitsky

A piece of art as much as a story to enjoy, 4 stars.

The first thing that struck me about The Way Home was the format in which this story is told. There's a very non-traditional series of time jumps that, at the start, can be hard to follow. The blurb description does this story an injustice. It sets up a plot expectation that the format doesn't fill, and the novel is so much more than that.

At the heart of the narrative is a friendship-maybe-more that grows over the kind of timespan you simply do not encounter in most romance books. And this is a romance, make no mistake. There is a domestic BDSM aspect (power exchange, spanking) that hints at some sexual overtones near the end of the story that I thoroughly enjoyed.

[trigger warning: major self-harm]

The major critique I had of this story surrounds the dominant conflict. Kat has depressive tendencies which culminate severely in two suicide attempts via sleeping pills. Either the format or the writing or both got in the way of my fully understanding this aspect of Kat. I didn't see a build-up to this kind of behavior so it caught me off guard. I'm not sure the first attempt was on-screen-- if it was then I didn't recognize it for what it was.

Anyone who enjoys the craft of writing, if you're into Tolstoy and Hemingway for their format as much as their content: read this book. If you're on vacation lounging for hours with nothing to interrupt you: read this book. There are beautiful scene pairs and excellent pacing throughout.

TL;DR: 4 stars. Beautifully written and as such, requires focus to enjoy.

Monday, February 10, 2014

P2P: Give Your Ending Room To Breathe

Photo by 
The ending of your short story or novel is what will stick with your reader the longest. Nailing the ending is how you evoke the catharsis feeling of a great story and there are some concrete ways to get there.

A good ending needs two things:

  • inevitability (the feeling that this is what everything leads up to)
  • offers closure (the satisfaction feeling)

And a great ending needs one more:

  • unexpected (the 'what? I didn't see that coming!')

Inevitability is the momentum you've built up over the course of the story into your climax and ending. It's the feeling in the reader that this is the only way things could have worked out. This means the 'easy' solutions to conflict are dealt with in some logical way. If the problem can be resolved with a frank conversation between the right people, you don't have a solid conflict.


Stay in tune with your protag's motivations: also known as staying 'in character.' The protag and antag of your story have their own histories, their own wants and desires. They need to constantly strive for those desires or the reader can't root for them. If Jimmy wants juice but keeps asking for water and then complaining about it, your reader has no sympathy for him. Replace 'juice' with anything your character wants: love, recognition, power, a puppy, revenge- as long as he strives for his goal throughout the story, you'll build the momentum necessary for an inevitable ending.

Reflect the beginning of your story in the end. Either mimic or oppose the situation you started with to evoke either coming full circle or growing beyond one's starting place. Your protag's motivations can help you identify which of the two would feel better. If your protag wants something back the way it was, a circular ending will feel conclusive. If she wants something to change (and gets it) an opposite ending will reflect that.

The protag's direct actions need to result in the ending. Have you ever read a book where at the very moment of crisis something comes out of the blue to save the heros? This is a technique called Deus Ex Machina- a latin phrase for 'god in the machine.' It means, essentially, that the protag hasn't caused his own ending which means all of that momentum you've built up means nothing. Of a cascade of coincidences solves the major conflict of the story, your reader will be cheated of their feeling of satisfaction. The protag needs to kill the king himself, needs to rescue the little girl, needs to master his power through his own force of will. Arbitrary coincidence can't do it for him.

Bring conflict to its full conclusion. The easiest way to cheat your reader of a satisfying ending, is to skip over consequences. Getting characters in trouble is the fun part, but if there are never any consequences to those actions, what do any of them matter? If your protag kills someone and it doesn't effect him in any way, if his sidekicks don't seem to care, what weight does that action hold? None at all. If the climax of your story involves a deadly battle with a werewolf and he barely survives but then you skip right over how he gets help and lives so you can show happily ever after, you've cut your reader out of half of the emotional arc. Gunshots leave holes, death leaves trauma, marriages are extended relationships- not one-time events. Make sure all of your protag's actions have consequences, good or bad, that you're not skipping over.

If you have everything above, a reader can come away from your story satisfied, having enjoyed the experience. But they may have been able to guess your ending, which leaves some people less-than-thrilled. It's still a good book, but they're not going to rave to their friends about it.

To be truly great, an ending must be unexpected. One way to twist the ending is to defy traditions: genre, age, gender, sexuality, caste, and more. The fantasy genre tends to bring the protag and most of their sidekicks through the plot alive. Kill them all off. Romance sub-plots end where the guy eventually wins over the girl. What if she's asexual or lesbian? The hero's usually the one saving the princess. What if the princess saved herself to rescue the hero? Twists on the inevitable ending your plot drives you toward will surprise your readers. If you plant three or four subtle clues throughout the book, your more astute readers will be very pleased they figured it out.


Throw in your voice below. What other ways have you seen endings twist for that 'wow!' feeling?

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Review: Rescuing Jack by Caitlin Ricci

A solid hurt/comfort but the ending is rushed. 3 stars

I love a good hurt/comfort story and Rescuing Jack is a great entry for this genre. It's a werewolf story where the paranormal is just a side-note to the character-driven focus. Marius (werewolf) who works and owns an animal shelter has a talent for pairing animals with new owners. Jack (human), recently sexually assaulted, thinks he needs a guard dog to keep the world at bay.

I enjoyed the details of Jack and Marius' progressing relationship and the reflection of Jack and Missy's trust issues. The biggest disappointment for me, however, is how quickly the sexual recovery happens. The majority of the progress Jack and Marius make in this book occurs over a 12 hour period maybe a week after they've met.

The external consequences of the attack (a video, extortion) are also treated like window dressing. The situation never felt very dire for me as Marius simply calls in his brother to take care of the issue.

I'm fond of the characters in this story. Everyone is distinct and running their own lives beyond Jack and Marius. Each voice remained clear and I'm particularly fond of Marius' brother even though he only got a few pages of screen time.

I feel like the book ended before it needed to. Jack grows rather dependent on Marius and the timeline doesn't provide enough room to show him growing into his own. I would have liked to see more of Jack standing on his own feet and knowing he could make it. Marius' brother also stirs up the comfortable relationship Marius and Jack have established but the book ends before any of that can be explored to resolution.

Over all, a solid book that I enjoyed in a single afternoon. Characters are relateable, the violence in Jack's past is handled realistically, and I'm fond of the animal shelter backdrop. Marius tries his best to do good, makes mistakes, and owns up to them.

TL;DR: 3 stars. Not much closure at the end, but an interesting character drama nevertheless.

Monday, February 3, 2014

P2P: My War Against Had and Was

Photo by Anonymous
Arguably one of the easiest ways to tighten up prose and bring a punch to your settings or action is to strike out most mentions of 'had' and 'was.' These words crop up to indicate complex past tense states that are, on the whole, unnecessary for clear prose.


Past Perfect Tense

  • He had faltered up the steps.
  • She had sang until her throat became hoarse.
  • They all had left a mess of the balcony.

The past perfect tense indicates a time period before a time in the past. It frequently crops up in past-tense fiction when referencing something that has already occurred. Since the story is written in past, the past perfect tense offers a double past indicator.


In almost every instance, had is unnecessary for the understanding of the sentence, slows down the scene, and takes the punch out of the verb that follows it. Also in almost every instance, all you have to do is remove it.

  • He faltered up the steps.
  • She sang until her throat became hoarse.
  • They all left a mess of the balcony.

Tighter, stronger. The reader doesn't need a double past indicator to understand when something is happening before something else. Context within the story provides that information as does simply placing the earlier event earlier in the draft of the story where it would have happened.


Future-In-the-Past

  • They were going to visit his Aunt.
  • He was planning on skipping stones on the lake.
  • She was going to cut vegetables for the stew.

Was/were is a little trickier as it's used for two different past tenses. The future-in-the-past tense indicates a plan for the future from a point of view in the past. There is an implied 'but something happened' in a future-in-the-past tense. 'She was going to cut vegetables for the stew, but traffic made her late.'

This tense format is useful in fiction, especially for close points of view. But 'was' tends to be a habit of unplanned prose as it's the context of the scene or a previous scene that tells the reader what the characters plan on doing. The writer shouldn't need to specify directly, it takes all the showing out of your story and places the sentence firmly in the telling category. 

The fix is not simple, unfortunately. If you've spent chapter one establishing that Boy's mother wants him to run the basket of apples to his Aunt in the woods, it's unnecessary to open chapter two with 'They were going to visit his Aunt.' But usually a rejigging of the paragraph is needed if the information isn't already obvious to the reader. 

Cutting vegetables, for instance: Sally slumped against the window of her bus seat. She couldn't drum up a smile for the little boy waving at her in the car next door. Traffic snarled in every direction and she checked her watch for the third time. Seven oh six. Mother came home to unchopped vegetables. 


Past Progressive and Gerunds
  • She was skipping with us.
  • He was throwing the ball.
  • They were cutting, taping, and gluing their craft projects.

 Past progressive tense indicates a thing that started in the past and continued for a while (either specified or vague). Again, there's an implied clause that something occurs to interrupt  the event that was happening. 'She was skipping with us until she fell down the hole.' 'He was throwing the ball until he hit a window.'


In conjunction with 'was' the following verb is forced into a gerund format, a verb that acts like a noun. They're easy to spot with 'ing' at the end of them. All verbs in the sentence that follow a 'was' or 'were' need to adopt this gerund status to maintain the correct subject/verb agreement.

But a verb that's forced into a noun isn't a strong verb at all. The easiest way to change this is simply remove 'was' and convert the gerund back into a verb in the simple past tense.

  • She skipped with us.
  • He threw the ball.
  • They cut, taped, and glued their craft projects. 

Notice that the sentences still work if the event in question is interrupted. 'She skipped with us until she fell down the hole.'


More Past Tenses

If you want to look into even more varieties of past tense, I recommend this post from Daily Writing Tips. They give good examples and decent explanations of each tense (though no cool visual timelines).

As always, editing guidelines are 1) subjective and 2) not set in stone. Great writers break rules all the time, but you should always know what the rule is for so you can break it deliberately.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Review: A Taste of Vanilla by Leigh Ellwood

Cute motif, but the craft isn't practiced. 2 stars

A Taste of Vanilla starts off well with a basic meet-up-for-sex premise. The vanilla/chocolate motif is a cute way to highlight the interracial pairing, but the writing itself was inconsistent. Only a thousand words into the story the POV becomes very muddled. Chapter one is supposed to be from Hailie's POV while chapter two is from Cecile's, alternating from there, but once the action moves from conversation to intimacy, the POV falls apart and it becomes very difficult to figure out who is doing what.

The character voice of both chapters is the same, despite a shift in POV. This only muddies the POV problem further, as I couldn't rely on vocabulary or dialogue differences to clue me into each character. For some reason, two supporting characters had almost identical names: Thora and Thea. With how difficult to was to keep just the main characters straight, this was unnecessary to manage as well.

I did enjoy the details of Thora's cooking and some of her backstory, but I feel like I know her better than the main characters! An entire opportunity to explore them is glossed over with 'Cecile felt she learned quite a bit about Hailie' telling rather than showing the reader their development.

TL;DR: A sexy story is buried in POV/voice issues too deeply to enjoy. 2 stars

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Review: The Condor by Isa K

The Condor is a book that presents unglamorous life with its human complications. It does this with grace but without celebration. 4 stars

I like The Condor. This book takes its reader on an interesting, but not dramatic, cruise along the countryside of the sex industry. It doesn't try to cover the grimy corners with polish or hold aloft its sex scenes as if to say, 'Look! Who cares if lives are falling apart, the sex is great!' The Condor puts its reader in the roll of quiet onlooker, 'See here as the whore preens in his native habitat, surrounded by fellows.'

This book doesn't sensationalize its content nor its characters. Everything is considered evenly important, from a new hire's first trick to the manager's heartbreak. I'm used to a romance introducing the love interest from chapter one and anticipating the 'how do they get together' moment from the start, but The Condor doesn't have a traditionally romantic plot. I didn't have any notion of where this story could take me, but nor was I clawing for more at the edge of my seat.

Instead I soared, gently, like the book's namesake, through the lives of these characters wanting to know more about what made them who they are now. This will never be a story that grabs readers by the throat demanding attention and that's a risky move. It's so heavily character driven that I frequently forgot to wonder what all of this was leading up to.

TL;DR: 4 stars. The Condor is a cozy M/M sex-industry novel. Quite possibly alone in its genre.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Review: Omorphi by C. Kennedy

What to say about Omorphi but why don't you own this book already? 5 stars

Omorphi, at its most broad is a story about abuse and the way that trauma follows a person. It's about learning how to support someone who has been abused, how to work through it, and recognize that love doesn't just fix the problem. Indeed, love is the reason to persist on the path toward healing and sometimes it's the only thing a person knows for sure while the world crumbles around them.

I honestly only had one reservation about this novel and that was the prologue. It gave additional context to the remainder of the story, but it wasn't necessary plot-wise and stylistically speaking, felt distant. The second scene in the prologue had a different POV that was not the main character and he didn't reappear until the climax of the novel. I don't think it detracted in any way from the flow of the story, but it wasn't necessary for understanding.

Omorphi is long. Almost 500 pages. Kennedy builds the characters slowly, deliberately, and every interaction provides additional insight into the lives of these people. The supporting cast is varied and strong. Not all of them were interesting or likable, but not every person in life is either. I felt like I was watching a select group of very smart young adults at the edge of their high school years deal rather well (most of the time) with the trauma of entering the adult world, coming out to parents and friends, the thrill of first relationships, and the chaos that Christy brings with him from Greece.

Kennedy doesn't once cop out on the plot or the characters. People don't do dumb things (ok, jumping a fence with a dislocated knee is stupid, but there's a solid supporting lead up, there) for no apparent reason. Arguments aren't simply resolved like magic. The drama isn't over 'does he like me, or doesn't he', the definition of a relationship, or even boys wearing lacy things. It's about things that matter, that persist over time, that change a person.

Abuse doesn't go away in chapter two.

Omorphi is a hurt/comfort story about two young men from completely different backgrounds finding common ground together and dealing with the wretchedness of humanity.

TL;DR: 5 stars. Trigger warnings all over the damn place, but if you can, read this novel. Then go paint something.

Amazon
Goodreads

Monday, January 13, 2014

P2P: Twitter

Original photo by USFW
For those uninitiated, Twitter is a short-form, global, public conversation with a million participants all talking at once. A planetary hive-mind of ideas and experience that happens in real-time. It's text messaging for the web with your texts limited to 140 characters.

The hivemind is filtered by the symbol #, also known as a hashtag (or octothorp if you're a writing nerd) and with it you can both broadcast to a specific group (#novel) or narrow your focus to a limited audience (#SoCal). It's also a tool to indicate an emotion or opinion, usually at the end of your text (#tmi #IDontWana #EndRant). Hashtags cannot contain any punctuation, but they're indifferent to capitalization. 

So. As an author you'll find twitter is a great place to both find an audience and connect with a lot of other authors, readers, agents, publishers, and other industry pros. The best way to introduce yourself and meet like-minded people is to hunt down a twitter chat that is in your genre. Attend and participate, you'll find friendly people and more contests than you can shake a stick at.

I use twitter to connect with and follow some of my favorite authors. I announce new blog posts there, seek out people to interview for my newsletter, and let everyone know when I have a new book available. I'll pop in during the day to see how other people are doing, I frequently haunt the #amwriting tag to give encouragement or answer easy questions people run into during their drafting process.

Here's a list of sites that have already done a great job collecting all kinds of writing related hashtags. 


And a list of twitter chats:


Finally, a website I use to figure out popular hashtags that are related to the ones I already know about:

hashtagify

Find me on twitter under @tamiveldura and let's talk! I'm frequently involved with #wschat and #genrechat.

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Review: Cut & Run by Abigail Roux and Madeleine Urban

I liked this novel over all, but not enough to fall in love: 3 stars.


Cut & Run ended up on my to-read list because it's won several awards and is consistently among the recommended books I find scattered around the internet. I wasn't disappointed, but I wasn't wow'd either.

I felt both the main characters were very strongly developed. From the beginning they have distinct and fun personalities that naturally clashed; the best kind of setup for an 'opposites attract' story. About half way into the novel I'm hooked, the characters are connecting with each-other and the plot is getting tense.

When things fall apart between them, the story also takes a turn for the worst. The characters develop to a point that they effectively swap stereotyped rolls which I found to be very appropriate given their experiences. And the relationship between them also faltered as it should.

However, there was no time dedicated to the characters in their new personalities in order for me to re-connect with them or to make their romantic re-connection believable. The story never recovers from this. The romance is appropriately stilted from the trauma of the plot but there was never enough time to settle into their new reversed and/or damaged personalities. It became all about plot and significantly less about characters.

Also, this book is co-written between two people and it really shows. The point of view is all over the place, often switching without warning from one paragraph to the next. This breaks the flow of reading and also causes some awkward pronoun issues. It constantly bothered me. The POV issues really stuck out in the second half when the personalities changed so dramatically that I couldn't rely on body language or dialogue content to clue me into who was doing or saying what.

These two issues really prevented me from getting lost in the world and devouring this story, which is unfortunate! The worldbuilding is excellent and the character dynamics were consistent throughout the novel. I very much enjoyed the investigation procedures (even thought the 'ah, ha' moment was deus ex machina). I thought pacing and tone were excellent across the bar. There are a lot of great things going for this story.

TL;DR: 3 Stars. There are some big craft issues but the important stuff was done right. I'll pick up book two, but I'm not sold on the series.

Goodreads
Amazon

Monday, January 6, 2014

P2P: Edit Yourself Backwards

Editing your own work is hard for several reasons. You know what's going on, so the picture in your head is complete. When you're reading your own work you don't really know what a brand new reader is seeing with your words. How complete is their picture? You also know the intent of the dialogue, and our brains- being awesome- fill in minor missing words without our eyes ever noticing. Sometimes, when we're really involved in a project, faults of logic can even slip past, causing huge pileups of edits later on.

So if editing yourself is so hard, is there anything you can do?


Edit Yourself Backwards
Have you ever tried reading a sentence backwards? Start at the end of your manuscript and work your way right to left. You'll notice right away that things go a lot slower like this. Making sense of a backward sentence takes a bit of doing- a lot like learning a new language where the nouns and adjectives are swapped. This enforced slower pace will make awkward sentences jump out right away. Missing words and strange tenses will become very obvious.

Edit Yourself Upside Down
This won't work on a tablet or your desktop computer, but print out a few text pages and try it. Flip your work upside down. Like the backwards technique, upside down forces your brain to work harder to translate into right-side-up words. You'll have the sentences in a logical order this way, so pacing, voice, and characters are easier to see.

Edit Yourself In The Mirror
Not going to lie, this one might be more trouble than it's worth. But for those avid readers who swallow doorstoppers in a day, it may come to this. Grab your laptop, get comfortable on the bathroom counter (or in front of a floor-length mirror if you want to be slightly more normal) and read your story in the reflection. With every letter flipped around b's and d's will get confused very quickly. Be methodical. Read word for word. Misspellings, missed punctuation, and all sorts of small weirdnesses will pop out at you, but it will take a long time.

Edit Yourself Out Loud
Every reader has a mental voice or two that carries them along through a text. Many readers, once they get into the story, start seeing it like a movie or hearing it, rather than reading the page. Hide in the farthest corner of the house in a quiet room to yourself, and read your story out loud. With you mouth, not your mental voice. Give the words weight and emphasis. Feel them. Pacing with scream at you this way, but so will awkward sentences and funny homonyms.
Even with all of the above, you won't catch everything. It's the nature of the beast. You will, at some point, need a beta reader or editor (request a quote!) to go over your work and critique or proofread before publication. That's ok! An outside look at things can give you some perspective. Still, in order to produce the cleanest copy you can, try combining all four of the above techniques at once. That'll slow your inner reader down.




Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Let's Get It Started

Original Photo by Brenda
Happy New Year and Welcome!

My name is Tami, I'm an author, editor, and artist with a degree in Creative Writing and an emphasis in fiction. I've been published through small presses, self published, and like most budding writers, I got my start in fanfiction. You can check out what I've done on the about page. Now I'm available to authors for evaluations and developmental edits of your short stories, flash fiction, serial fiction, novellas, and novels. For editing services and a list of genres I read, visit this page.

Throughout the next year I'll be posting common writing errors: both how to identify them and how to fix them. Topics range from keeping your character's voices consistent to what exactly does 'show, don't tell' mean and when do you apply it?

Follow this blog by email or RSS to be notified when a new blog goes up.

And when you have a story ready for editing, don't hesitate to request a quote.