Writer Unboxed

(Happy Friday the 13th!)
Missed parts one and two of WU’s interview with Jeri Smith-Ready? You can catch up HERE and HERE. In this, our final chunk-of-the-chat, we talk about POV, dialogue and writing screenplays, among other things. (Did you know that Jeri’s romantic comedy script, Between the Lines, made it to the quarterfinals in […]

You might live in lovely North Carolina or California, or reside in some picturesque beach house in Hawaii or New Zealand, but we WU mamas (Kath and Therese) live in dreary upstate New York. And it’s been cold here. And rainy. And snowy. And cold. Did we mention cold? Where in this world, exactly, does […]

Normally, Therese is the one with the health-related posts on writing.  But I came across this tidbit of news today that I thought I’d share with you:
Writing Reduces Stress.
Really?  Sometimes I think writing increases stress, especially when I can’t get a scene to work or everything on the page sounds like drivel.
Researchers have found that […]

I read a great article in The New Yorker recently called Cooked Books, about the place of recipes and food talk in novels. Said the author’s article Adam Gopnik:
Cooking is to our literature what sex was to the writing of the sixties and seventies, the thing worth stopping the story for to share, so to […]

Finally, it was my turn for a movie in my family’s Netflix queue, and good luck that my movie arrived over the holiday weekend. I’d been wanting to see Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette for some time. Turns out I could’ve kept waiting.
For historical film buffs like me, it was something of a […]

Jeri Smith-Ready has not only been busy writing her highly acclaimed Aspect of Crow series, she’s been busy selling new ones. Pocket Books (a division of Simon & Schuster) recently purchased her funny urban fantasy vampire series, about a bunch of vampire DJs. The first book, Bad Company, will be released next year, followed […]

I got a wonderful question on my blog the other day about what separates successful writers, defined by this reader’s terms as writers who earn a good living solely at writing, from the rest of the heap, and I thought this might be a good subject to tackle here at Unboxed. I think it […]

Do you ever have one of those days where everything seems to work out?  Crazy, I know!  Most days I lurch from crisis to crisis, so when my head hits the pillow I already mourn time lost to the banality of X (fill in the blank, annoying co-worker, freak illnesses, telemarketer).
But yesterday, ah, what a […]

You may have seen the show Flip that House or at least be familiar with the concept: Buy a house with a good locale that needs work (usually a lot of it), make smart changes and upgrades where applicable, then sell said house for oodles more than you paid. I’m too lazy for this. I […]

Last week I blogged about embedding contradictory character traits into your protagonists to keep them fresh. At the very same time, Elena Greene over at Risky Regencies was blogging about the opposite kind of character, one with no compelling traits at all. She called it something I’d never heard of before: the Mary […]