That Have Also Helped Me Become a Better Writer — We’re celebrating Mother’s Day here in the United States today. Happy day to everyone who is or acts in the role of mother. I wanted to share today, just a few things that I learned from my mom that has helped be become a better writer. My mom had a…

Learn to Move Forward and Keep Writing — As I finish reading and grading about 100 business proposals and I reach the end of a semester, I’m feeling a little brain dead. I “need” to blog to stay on my schedule, but mostly to comment on the issue the comes up regularly with students. Inevitably, someone will ask…

Create the Best Situation for Writing by Adding Music to Your Writing Routine — There’s this app called Novel Effect. I don’t know a lot about it, just that it adds sounds and music to stories to bring children’s books “to life” and though in a way it saddens me that children need this kind of stimulation to enjoy a book, I understand why…

Third-Person Point of View Gives You Multiple Options — When we decide to write a story, one of the first things we decide, subconsciously maybe, is which point of view we want to use to tell the story. In my last blog, I shared why first person POV is so popular and why it might be a great point…

Why First-Person Point of View is Popular Among Writers — Judging your own writing is tough. We all think or want to believe that we write well. If we didn’t believe it, we’d give it up immediately. But the truth is that it’s difficult to know if we really are as good as we believe we are. We hope so…

You Probably Already Have but Are You Doing It Right? — This might be a weird blog post — but I believe it’s something we all write about, so why not talk about it. When my first novel was acquired by my first publisher, it was a Latino romance. It was an exciting time for many reasons. I was getting published…

What You Gain and What They Gain — I’m currently reading an ARC — advanced reading copy of Margo Candela’s book, The Neapolitan’s Sisters (I’ll be posting my review soon on Goodreads and other places). When I’m finished with that, I’ll be reading three contest entries for the Book Buyer’s Best Contest since I’m one of the judges. …

Author brands come from beliefs, values, and interests — “Write the story of your heart.” I heard this so many times when I first started writing. Other writers, agents, editors all repeated this one line at conferences, and it started to annoy me after a while. No shit, I’m writing the story of my heart. Every story is the…

Decide Why You Want to Have a Newsletter Before Creating One — We are encouraged by marketing experts to connect with readers. Social media is one way of doing it, but it is more effective, we’re told, to send readers newsletters. Collect people’s emails and add them to our mailing list. Once we have the mailing list, send them newsletters. Okay, confession…