Author: Kristin Wolden Nitz
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Dori Wins the Edgar!
My writer friend Dori Hillestad Butler has had quite a year. First, she was nominated for the Edgar for her book, THE CASE OF THE LOST BOY, which is part of her BUDDY FILES series. Then she found herself in the middle of a censorship brouhaha when a woman from Texas complained about the specificity…
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The PSLA YA Top 40 (or so)
Suspect made the Pennsylvania YA Top 40 (or so) list. I’m afraid that “or so” means closer to 200 books, but it’s still a lovely honor. Here’s the review from the librarian who nominated it: Seventeen-year-old Jen goes to help her Grandma Kay for the summer at the bed-and-breakfast she owns, but finds herself investigating the…
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Another Blank Book
Back in March, I opened up a fresh blank book that I’d gotten for Christmas last year and started scribbling away on what I’d been calling the Italian chase novel. The black and white cloth cover was attractive enough. I would have been happy to scritch-scratch away on all of my outlines and extremely rough…
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Over 5000 Words Already?
In general, I tend to work quite slowly. Dialgoue might flow easily, but then I have to smooth all of the details that bring a story to life with action, description and movement. That’s why I’m just a bit surprised to discover that I’m about 5600 in. The first chapter is fairly polished. The second has…
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Chapter 2: Roughed In
Every novelist approaches projects differently. My technique is usually to get what I call a semi-polished rough draft in place for one chapter before moving on to the next. In my case, that means that I’ve got most of the dialogue down as well as a goodly chunk of the action. Instead of polished description,…
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If THE LIAR SOCIETY Looks Interesting…
It was fun to find SUSPECT in Kirkus again. This time it accompanied THE LIAR SOCIETY review in the “similar books” section. Nice!
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The Terrors of Revising and Submitting
You can find Jeannie Mobley’s extremely amusing post on Zen and the Art of Manuscript Submitting at Emu’s Debuts. I had to laugh when Norse mythology was added to the fruit salad of literary allusions.
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Plotting and Planning with Jennifer Mattson
Last weekend I made my usual pilgrimage back to Missouri for the annual SCBWI retreat. One of the guests was Jennifer Mattson, an agent with Andrea Brown. She joked that she was “celebrating the nerdiness within” as she prepared her speech because it brought her back to the days of writing term papers. I had to smile when…
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Chapter One….More or Less Done!
Picture book writers maintain that they have to slave over every single word. I believe them. In fact, I was more than willing to agree with them that they had a much tougher job on a word by word basis than novelists did. That was before I spent three weeks writing the first chapter of…
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Reading Reviews
Some writers don’t read the reviews of their books. Many of those who will read reviews from professional journals will avoid reader feedback from places like GoodReads. That would undoubtedly be both smarter and safer. A very wise writer said that “Good reviews are like crack; bad reviews, like poison.” But I’m blessed and cursed with an…
Kristin Wolden Nitz 