Melissa Maygrove

First, I'd like to announce the winners of last week's giveaway. The winners of the 5-page critiques are : First crit: Natasha Hanova of ' Writes By Moonlight ' Second crit: Hope Roberson of ' Writing With Hope ' And the third crit--two crits actually (because I'm feeling generous = P)--go to... Sara H. & Joel P. , two of the OYANer students who are studying writing using the One Year Adventure Novel curriculum. Sara & Joel are home-schooled students, both in 11th grade. The winner of the $15 Amazon gift card is : Jamie DeMoville Adams Woot!!! Here's proof Rafflecopter chose -- not me: = ) To everyone who participated - Thank you! And to C.B. Wentworth - Thanks for the award and the kind mention. ; ) Visitors - if you haven't started following CB's blog, you should. I also wanted to throw this in... For a super-interesting post on indie publishing by Susan Kaye Quinn, click here . ### Now for today...

I don't have any guests scheduled for today, nor do I have any great words of wisdom bursting forth to type into this big white space ( ...you can stop snickering now.  = P ). So I decided to do a pop quiz of sorts and see who is visiting my blog. To reward my faithful followers I'm giving away 2 things. Well, 4 really. To the first 3 people who comment on this post , I'm giving away a free, 5-page critique . HURRY! If you want a critique, scroll down and comment right now, then come back up and finish reading this! LOL - Now that that's out of the way, take your time. For the 4th prize: For everyone who visits this post until midnight on the 27th , I'm offering a chance to win a $15 Amazon gift card . (That equals anywhere from the better part of one best-seller hardback to fifteen 99c kindle books. = P Keep in mind, it can be used on other stuff besides books.) If you want to enter the drawing for the gift card, leave me a comment and fill out the Rafflecopter ...

Image Source: David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net “If you get a bad review, it’s because someone outside your target audience has found your book and gave it a shot. It’s no reflection on them as a reader, and no reflection on you as a writer. If, as an author, you don’t understand this, your writing will suffer, because you’ll be writing not to get bad reviews instead of writing to reward your target audience.”   – John Locke The current consensus on whether or not authors should reply to a bad review is 'don't.' Some say don't even read them at all. I personally find myself torn between reading my (eventual - thinking positive here) reviews to see if there are repeated comments on certain aspects of my writing that might need improvement and ignoring them entirely to spare my feelings and my motivation. For a thought-provoking post on the subject, click here . And for a hilarious post on the subject, [click here... Update: Unfortunately, Melj...

Today, I'm excited to introduce author Dani Pettrey who is joining us with a recipe for fiction. Prior to publishing her debut novel Submerged , Dani finished as a finalist in several contests: ACFW’s Genesis, Heart of the West, Where the Magic Begins, Golden Acorn, and the Daphne du Maurier. Please give her a warm welcome. A Novel Recipe by Dani Pettrey Today I’d like to share a novel writing recipe. It is in no way intended as a recipe for formulaic writing, but rather a list of fiction ingredients necessary for any story. How you approach these steps and the order you work in is completely up to you. Have fun! Ingredients for Writing a Novel: Plot : Also called the storyline. Look up the definition of plot and you will get a number of different answers surprisingly enough, but the most concise and barebones definition I’ve found is: the arrangement of events that make up a story . Plot is intricately tied to story structure : the way in which characters, events, reactions, go...

Carrie Butler -- author, friend, and  winner in the first campaign challenge -- has given me another award.   Thanks, Carrie. = )   I'm supposed to answer these questions and pass the award on to some deserving bloggers.  Favorite Color: Blue Favorite Animal: Dog (Puppy, if it belongs to someone else. LOL) Favorite Number: Any number that doesn't expect me to add, subtract, multiply or divide it with another number. (I'm not bad at math. I just get more than enough practice between balancing the checkbook, homeschooling, and figuring medication doses at work. Blek.) Favorite Non-Alcoholic Drink: Orange La Croix Facebook or Twitter: Facebook. Although with their changes, I'm inclined to say 'neither.' And I'll take any Twitter advice anyone is willing to give. My Passions: How much time do you have? :P  If I had to pick 2, they would be writing and the renewing of common sense in our country . Getting or Giving Presents: I'm going to steal part ...

This is a short post about word verification a.k.a. 'Captcha' on Blogger (Google) blogs. The purpose of word verification is to prevent automated spam. You may not even realize you have it, because it doesn't require you to do it when making comments on your own blog. But it will discourage visitors from posting comments, so you should seriously consider turning it off. If word verification is on, your visitors will see something like this when they post  a comment: After typing their comment, they must decipher and enter the wavy words shown and get them exactly right, caps and all before their comment will be posted. When someone is visiting several sites or posting multiple comments, this gets very old very fast. From what I've been told, Blogger controls spam fairly well, so this really isn't needed. As an added layer of protection, I restrict anonymous posts to my site. So far, I've not had any problems with spam or inappropriate comments. (5-30...

Today, I have a real treat for you--award-winning, multi-published, regency romance author Linore Rose Burkard with an article on building characters. Linore graduated from the City University of New York with a magna cum laude degree in English Literature, and now lives in Ohio where she enjoys writing her books, creating her monthly ezine ("Regency Reflections"--free to anyone who subscribes at her website ), and giving workshops on writing, Jane Austen, and marketing. Here's Linore... Building Believable Characters For Your Novel by Linore Rose Burkard Author Joanne Reid once said, "One of the leading causes of rejection by a publisher is poorly developed, one-sided characters."  If you've been reading fiction for any length of time you're probably inclined to agree. Characters can make or break a story. But is there a key to creating characters that aren't one-sided? A method to avoid writing poorly developed ones? I believe ther...

Romance writers, especially those interested in writing Christian Fiction, will enjoy today’s guest, Fay Lamb. Fay wears many hats, but she’ll be speaking to you today as ‘Fay Lamb, published author of romantic suspense.’ Please, give her a warm welcome and enjoy the article. Writing Romance: When Less is More There are certain Bible passages that lift my heart or stir deep feelings in me no matter how many times I’ve read them. Genesis 26:8 is one of those. “And it came to pass, when he [Isaac] had been there a long time, that Abimelech king of the Philistines looked out at a window, and saw, and, behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his wife.” In this instance, sporting refers to a caress. And what a caress it must have been for a king to immediately realize Isaac was more to Rebekah than a brother. In fact, the next verse tells us that in that caress the king knew Rebekah was Isaac’s wife. There’s nothing scandalous in the Bible’s account, so what makes it touch hearts so deeply...

Thanks, C. B. Wentworth , for the blog award!  Here are my words: A ltruistic -  B ookcase-collector -  C reative -  D etermined -  E ager    F un-loving - G ardener -  H omeschooler -  I maginative -  J ust -  K ind -  L oner M oon pie muncher -  N urse -  O rganized - P ractical -  Q uiet -  R ealistic -  S hy T yping and typing and typing -  U nruffled -  V isual - W riter needs a X anax (kidding) - lover of Y esterday -  Z aftig Who’s next?  It was hard to choose, but these blogs are quite awesome and deserve to be recognized: Lynda R. Young's blog, W.I.P It Carrie Butler @ Soyoureawriter Christy Farmer Nancy Kimball It’s easy to accept the ABC Award!  Here’s what you need to do: 1. Use the alphabet to describe yourself. 2. Pass the award to as many nominees as you see fit and let them know. = )

This is my entry in Rach's second campaign challenge . There are several prompts, choices and rules, so I'm just going to list the link. For my entry, I chose to: Write a short story/flash fiction piece of less than 200 words based on the prompts. (Word 2010 says 196)   & Write in a genre that is not your own to add difficulty. Source: piyaphantawong / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Suffer the Children .       Troy grimaced at the gaping cut on his thigh. He tore a strip from his shirt and tied it above the gash. Dark red rivulets slowed to a stop. .       Sarina leaned over. “Let me see.” She was beautiful—her green eyes sparkling like puddles in the sun and her auburn hair laying in wet ringlets, framing her face. Made him forget his pain. And rue his fate.  .       Their fate.  .       “It’s not that bad,” he lied. .       As they settled back against th...