by Linda Rodriguez As an artist and creative person, I can experience times when I reach down for ideas, for creative excitement, for images, and come up temporarily empty. These have usually been times that have combined lots of creative overwork and lots of business work—taxes, promotion, correspondence, contracts, freelance editing, etc. This kind of […]
by Linda Rodriguez I’ve thrown another book against the wall—or at least, I’ve wanted to. I’m far too respectful even of bad books to inflict physical damage on them. And this wasn’t a totally bad book. It was completely unrealistic, but unfortunately, it wasn’t set in some fantasy kingdom or far away on another planet. […]
by Linda Rodriguez I’m a day late getting this blog posted. My apologies, but I’d been dealing with illness, which suddenly took a drastic turn for the worse. I spent yesterday and last night absolutely miserable with fever and chills and vomiting, and I just lost track of my blogging days. But better late than […]
by Linda Rodriguez I’m a big believer in using all the help technology and professional writing books and programs can give me in writing. I’ve tried using all kinds of workbooks, charts, and forms in working on a novel. I’m even now learning to use Scrivener to write my next book. I’m hardly on the […]
by Linda Rodriguez I had a dream for many decades, a dream that I would write novels that would be published by a major publisher to great reviews and win many honors. And for many years I had to put that dream on hold for lack of time as I worked a demanding and fulfilling […]
by Linda Rodriguez At the end of a course I recently taught, one of my students sent me a scene-by-scene outline of her book. I could see as I considered it where her problem lay—and it was a pretty major problem. I had to consider whether to soft-pedal my response. This student had been very […]
by Linda Rodriguez People have been known to ask me how I get so many different things done. After I do a double-take, trying to see who they were talking to (because it certainly couldn’t be me with the huge, never-finished to-do list), I reply that I do it by not doing what I was […]
by Linda Rodriguez This will be the shortest blog post I’ve ever written. Primarily because it’s the middle of the night, and I just got home from many unexpected hours in a suburban hospital. A good friend was supposed to have emergency open-heart surgery at 6:00 a.m. Thursday, and I had agreed to sit and […]
by Linda Rodriguez This holiday season is a time of excitement for me. I am about to get that room of my own that Virginia Woolf warned all women must have to write: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” How can this be, you […]
by Linda Rodriguez Right now, I’m in the middle of a book. Actually, I’m usually in the middle of writing a book or about to finish a book or about to begin a book. It’s the cycle of life for writers, especially novelists. The middle of the book, though, is the hardest because it’s where […]