Five Ways to Trick Yourself into Finishing Your Novel
Sometimes writing resembles the proverbial love affair: an idea catches one’s attention, and then it’s all one can think about, which leads to a series of heart flutters while one ponders a first attempt at flirtation. And then oh, the emotions are mutual, excitement builds, intimacies achieved, which leads to a swell of reality. Things are not as they were first envisioned. Characters have weaknesses which they drip around the room like melted wax. If one’s stores of patience are thin, the relationship ends almost before it really began.
Everyone has an unfinished novel. Read More…
A joke made its way around the interwebs a couple of weeks ago:
Let’s take a closer look at this. The goal of the terrorist is to change the operations, lifestyles, and structures of a society through fear and the use and threat of violence. The IRA hoped to “secure the independence” of Ireland by getting the populace to reject England’s rule and later, to take back Northern Ireland. Blowing up buses and assassinating royalty did change life in Great Britain, 
Once upon a time, I worked as an evaluator of information systems, which apparently nobody thinks are important in Walla Walla, but which trust me, they sorely need. The usable Web sites are few and far between around here, even for well funded organizations and businesses. But I digress. I bring up information design when talking about online presence because both of them, for me at least, start with the same set of questions.
I have read a lot about building a following of readers, having online presence, working the social networks, and so on. And while a lot of it seems reasonably useful, there are also slews of articles that rub me the wrong way or that I’m not willing to do. Also, while I don’t claim to be the most successful network builder out there, I have gotten a lot more attention and a greater presence than I thought I would in just a couple of years. Yes, years. There is no such thing as an overnight sensation. Or if there is such a thing, one ought not plan to be that. I might as well develop a 5-year plan for flying myself to Mars. 
Those of us who’ve spent time honing our language use and craft have inevitably stumbled across the occasional comment or question about whether we could donate our skills to writing something for them or someone they know. A newsletter needs one last article, or someone read a call for essays on fishing, or have we ever thought about ghostwriting, because it seems like there’s always work for ghostwriters. (Hint: ask an actual ghostwriter and one may receive a different impression.) It’s as if any writer can write about any subject, in any form, and within any genre. We practically poop letters.
It’s a common statement about stories—the conflict is the story. Sure, conflict is the center of a story’s universe, in that it pulls all of the elements together and is the thing around which those elements revolve. And yet it’s what the characters do in response to that conflict that keeps us reading. After all, the audience can’t identify with the conflict itself—they identify with how one or more of the actors reacts to the conflict. If those characters aren’t fully envisioned on the page, there isn’t enough for the reader to latch onto, and writers run the risk of breaking a cardinal rule: The story must be believable.
I understand the appeal of putting up the best of the worst queries that land in an agent’s inbox, of letting off a little steam of frustration and giving everyone a laugh in the process, I really do. There is no end, after all, to the pipeline of awful query letters. After reading through agent blogs, Twitter links, fan pages and the occasional Writer’s Digest article, I can even scratch out some categories of Terrible Queries:
Trans/plant/portation 