Author: Kristin Wolden Nitz
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Some thoughts on writing from Donna Jo Napoli
I’ve been collecting quotes from writers and editors for the past 18 years or so. In fact, I just delivered a talk at the Michigan SCBWI’s fall conference on Mackinac Island that shared the quotes that I’ve been collecting for the past 18 years. I had about two pages worth of them from various events…
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Back to Blogging
I’m not surprised that September 1 was the last time I managed to pull together a blog post. My husband and I took a trip to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons from September 10 to the 17. That took prep time. Five or six days after our return, I was off to Mackinac Island for a…
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Writing A Thousand Words A Day?
Some of my agency sibs are annoyingly astonishingly prolific. They add thousands of words a day and post totals on Facebook. I cheer in their comments section because I am honestly delighted that their words are piling up. But there is that grumpy little envious corner of my brain that’s jealous, jealous, jealous even though I understand that…
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Defending from Irene
I”m another person who’s constantly checking the status of Hurricane Irene from a distance. Since I teach remotely for the Institute of Children’s Literature, I have a lot of students in harms’ way. I’m praying that they and their stories are all safe and dry.
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Characters Who Are Too Dumb to Live
As I might have mentioned before, one of the tricky things about writing in the suspense/mystery/thriller genre is ensuring that your characters aren’t too dumb to live. There has to be a reason for them to keep their deadly secrets or roam through dangerous places. In fact, there was one series of books by a mystery…
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End of Summer Quick Reads
It was fun to find SUSPECT on a list of suggested books for a last-hurrah-of-the-summer kind of book put together by a librarian in Harris County, Texas.
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Serving as the Michigan Mentor
When my friend, fellow author and Michigan Ad-Com member Pat Trattles approached me about serving as the novel mentor, I couldn’t say no. Really. As Robert Heinlein pointed out to Spider Robinson decades ago, you can never really pay a professional writer back for the help that they’ve given you. You can only pay forward. Winning…
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Over 12,000 Words
Despite my “Escape from the Seiser Alm” post, I’ve found myself going back there more than once. But that’s part of my standard operating procedure since I can’t just leave things at the level of what Annie LaMott calls “a sh***y first draft” and move on. One important reason for this is my Dreamweavers’ critique…
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Escape from the Seiser Alm!
My characters and I have been trapped up on the Seiser Alm for weeks now. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a beautiful place to be. I’ve enjoyed the research. But today, I decided that I had to break out. After studying pictures and video from the web–not to mention our old photo albums, I knew…
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Over 11,000
I’m finally digging in again on PORTRAIT. This week I managed to pull together over a thousand words. It really shouldn’t be that difficult. I try not to get jealous when my Facebook friends manage to pull together three or four thousand words a day. But one of the problems with this chapter is that…
Kristin Wolden Nitz 