One of the best ways to make your book un-put-down-able is to incorporate suspense throughout your story. But building suspense is an art and, like any art, it can be a challenging skill to master. Here, I’ll go over two key principles and several specific tools to...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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.
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...
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...
Have you ever wondered about the rhyme and reason behind punctuating descriptive phrases? Why do we use a hyphen in “a well-built house,” a comma in “a strong, stable house,” and no punctuation at all in “a big red house”? Speaking of which, why does it sound weird...