Category: Announcements
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Word Wrangling with the Bounce Queen
I’ve given my students and other fellow writers plenty of advice through the years on how to make a poem “scan” correctly. And I’ve always felt like a bit of a fraud when I’ve done it because I hadn’t ever sold a poem. Still, twelve years of piano lessons and a good working relationship with mathematics…
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Suspect: The Cover!
This bit of fun turned up in my email. It’s not at all what I expected, but is quite fun nevertheless!
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Conspiracy of Kings
Attention all fans of Megan Whalen Turner’s Attolia books! You’ll find a 60+ page excerpt of Conspiracy of Kings on the HarperCollins website. Naturally, they didn’t put it up there as a public service. The chapters are there so you’ll read it and then rush out to buy the book on the very day that it becomes…
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Suspect
It’s official! SUSPECT, my YA mystery, will be released October 1! Here’s a description from the publisher: Seventeen-year-old Jen is scheduled to spend the summer helping Grandma Kay run the Shoenhaus, a Victorian bed and breakfast. But Grandma Kay’s plans include a lot more than housekeeping; she intends to solve a real mystery from the past…
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Stand-in for Murder
It’s not a 100% certainty, but it looks like my YA mystery will be released in the fall of 2010 with the title of STAND-IN FOR MURDER. This morning, I finished the preliminary revisions to the first three chapters. I’m sure that they’ll need some polishing, but I want to wrap up a draft by Christmas…
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Prospecting for Gold Nuggets
My article Prospecting for Gold Nuggets is now up on the Institute for Children’s Literature’s website. It discusses how important it is to come up with a strong premise for your writing projects.
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YA Mystery: Chapter 1 Revision is Done!
First chapters and last chapters are often among the hardest ones for any novelist. You have to first pull the reader smoothly into your world with the first and ease them out in a satisfying way in the last. It’s necessary to put in just enough information so that the readers know exactly what’s going…
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The Writers’ Revision Retreat
There is no great writing, only great rewriting. – Justice Brandeis That quote sums up the importance of revision rather nicely. It will be one of the themes for the 2010 SCBWI Missouri retreat on revision, which will be held April 23-25 at the Trout Lodge YMCA. I’ll be one of the presenters. Here’s an excerpt…
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Chapter 5: Done! At Least for Now.
I finished up the conversations in Chapter 5 and linked them together loosely in a rougher than usual draft. I know that I’m going to have to go back and add in more specific detail, but I’ve done a lot of meditating on the changes that I’ll need to be doing on my YA mystery,…
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Revising STAND-IN FOR MURDER
Last week, I received a phone call from my editor at Peachtree. She called to let me know that she was just about ready to give me some feedback on my YA mystery, STAND-IN FOR MURDER (working title). It now has a tentative place on the schedule: Fall, 2010! She asked me to read through…
Kristin Wolden Nitz 