The Novel Craft Blog

A Beta Reading Guide for Fiction Authors

If you’re looking to gain valuable feedback on how readers experience your story, beta readers are a great resource. Beta reading is when someone reads your manuscript and gives you informal feedback. Beta readers don’t give you the trained, technical perspective...

Where to Connect with Winnipeg’s Writing Community

There are a lot of things I love about Winnipeg and Manitoba. We’re the home of Louis Riel, the nineteenth-century advocate for Metis rights. We were the first Canadian province to grant women the right to vote in 1916. This is the land that offered my...

When to Use Who & Whom in Fiction

I’m sure you’ve heard the word whom before, but if you’re like most people, you don’t ever use it. Maybe when you take on a fake British accent and use a mock-posh tone you throw a whom in there for good measure, but you likely don’t know where it’s technically meant to go. Yes, whom means something different than who. Or at least, they’re meant to go in distinctly different places.

How to Format Your Novel for Editing

One easy way to save your copy editor time and you money (and make her love working with you) is to professionally format your manuscript before sending it in. At this stage, your editor doesn’t want fancy fonts or unusual formatting (no matter how fun those things...

When to Use Sentence Fragments in Fiction

Welcome to the first post in How to Break Grammar Rules in Fiction, my regular segment that explains why grammar rules exist so you can know how to break them like an artist. On the chopping block this week: sentence fragments.

How Editors Set Their Rates

Professional editing is an important investment for the future of your book. It can also be a big investment, and a lot of authors are surprised by how much editing ends up costing. I’ll clear the waters here so you can know what professional editing costs, how...

Which Editing Service Is Best for My Current Writing Stage?

Every time I get a new editing inquiry from an interested author, one of the first things I do is make sure that my services are a right fit for the author’s writing and publishing stage. There are so many different editing services and different names for each...

The Controversial Comma: A Guide to Navigating the Oxford Comma

You may be surprized to learn that there is a piece of punctuation that people get really up-in-arms about. It’s called the Oxford comma, or the serial comma, and there are a lot of people who are very passionate about using it. I used to be one of those people,...

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