A writing retreat pays big dividends, and it doesn’t have to take a bite out of your wallet. Do you have access to a cabin, a condo, or a room over the garage? You could sign up for a Costa Rican retreat with daily writing, critique, and personal coaching sessions at a couple of thousand dollars per person. Or. . . create your own retreat for next to nothing! That’s what my critique group did. Share the Load One member generously offered her time-share condo for the weekend, another made sure we had enough snacks to keep us going, and two members provided meals. Everyone was responsible for their own…
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Filler Words
People use, you know, filler words when they talk all the time. It’s something we um, accept as part of like, natural speech. Did you notice the you know, um, and like? These words don’t have any redeeming value whatsoever. Writing has filler words too. Just, really, and very are a few examples. Generally speaking if you cut these words out, they will not affect the meaning of your sentence. As always, there are some exceptions. Amplifiers I can almost hear you disagreeing with me about very. Let’s look at an example. You might write: the very small dog barked as loud as a foghorn. Obviously you want to convey…
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NaNo Prep
NaNoWriMo is just around the corner. What’s that you ask? It’s shorthand for National Novel Writing Month. Each November since 1999, participants have attempted to write a 50,000 word novel. That’s a lot of words! Resources: Word Tracker NaNoWriMo’s website at NaNoWriMo.org is chock full of helpful resources. There’s a word tracker to show progress toward your word count goal. It’s set up as a graph. With days on the X axis and word count on the Y axis a target slope gives you a daily word count goal. Your actual progress shows where you stand in relation to the target slope. If you write every single day with no…
