by Katie McCoach

You’ve finished the first draft of your novel, now it’s time for revisions. We know that you’ll need a professional editor soon, but before that, what can you do on your own? Revisions need to start somewhere, so here are a few options for editing your own work:

By Ronit Feinglass Plank

I had been writing fiction and wanted to try nonfiction, so I began with personal essays. I didn’t think memoir was for me; in fact I was deliberately avoiding it. I didn’t see a reason to revisit the facts of my confusing childhood and thought memoir wouldn’t be as challenging as creating a world from scratch and putting characters in it. To tell my own story, the story I knew by heart, seemed almost too easy.

I could not have been more wrong. I was about to discover that looking at something you think you know pretty well with fresh eyes and trying to understand it in a new way is definitely not easy. I did try writing several personal essays but the history of how I grew up kept barging in, taking up more and more space. It seemed part of me really wanted to…

by Jacqui Murray

Now that I’ve published my first novel, To Hunt a Sub, I can say from experience that writing it and editing it took equally long periods of time (and marketing is just as involved). After finishing the final rough draft (yeah, sure) and before emailing it to an editor, I wanted it as clean possible. I searched through a wide collection of self-editing books like these:

The Novel Writer’s Toolkit by Bob Mayer

Self-editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne

The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing by Evan Marshall

This Sunday Share comes from a blog I am new and unfamiliar with called An American Song but I liked what I read.  This author has written a book where he (she?) interviewed people all across America, average people, and wrote down their stories.  It sounds a lot like what I do here with Babu and although I haven’t read the book yet, I am looking forward to doing so.

This post, for me, hit on one of the things I find troubling with Trump’s slogan.  You know the one.  What exactly does he find not great?  Are they the same things that I see need fixing?  Does he appreciate what I see as wonderful?  This is a positive post and I felt it was something I, personally, needed to hear right now.

by Tonya R. Moore

Rejection bites. That’s the plain and simple truth.

You pour your heart into a story and revise the heck out of it. Then you submit/query and repeat until hopefully, someone finally thinks that you have something worth publishing.

Unless you’re some sort of literary genius whose work always gets accepted on the very first submission, it can become quite a discouraging process.

by Tonya R. Moore

There’s all this hubbub floating around out there lately, conflicting theories of all the DOs and DON’Ts of what it takes to be or become a successful author.

Some time ago, I saw some Perpetual Writing Advice Giver actually tweet that if you’re a writer promoting your work and you don’t have this many (double digit) thousand followers on Twitter, you’re simply not trying hard enough. To add insult to offense, said party didn’t even have a half of that “strongly suggested” following.