"John grabbed a bunch of those little ring thingies, some pulleys, a few snapping whatchagoodies and put them in the bag." We're finding organization is important. We need to have certain information at our fingertips. I don't want to visit Wikipedia or Google or Encarta every time a character does something I've never done. I'd...
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Okay, time to pull my head out. I must have read this small excerpt half a dozen times before it caught my eye. I’m sure an editor or agent would have read that, rolled his or her eyes and put the manuscript back into the S.A.S.E.
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We’ve been talking a lot lately about characters’ names in a young adult novel. This may seem trivial, but we’ve discussed this subject so many times...At one point, the discussion grew so burdensome we set a few ground rules for ourselves with respect to character names.
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We’ve hit a few obstacles, not because we can’t decide how something is going to happen, or even what is going to happen next. The obstacles have been logistical, like thinking of something really good, how this and that fit together, and then forgetting what we said by the time we got home.
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Okay, we thought about it. Sounds like a plan. We figured we might as well jump all the way in, feet first. That’s our style: ready-set-jump, look down. Sometimes it works to our benefit, sometimes not. But creative minds tend to run a little heavy on the emotional side and, after all, this was...
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How do you clean a watercolor painting? Watercolor paintings, because of their difficulty to clean, should to be stored in frames with glass, even when not on display. This is simply to keep them from being exposed to the elements and getting ruined. But what do you do if you have a watercolor painting that...
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