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About Marsha Moyer

Recent Posts by this author:

  • Breathing Room
  • Hell or High Water
  • Unfinished
  • Getting Naked
  • Finished, Part 2
  • Finished
  • Stand Up and Shout! (How the Dixie Chicks won 5 Grammys for refusing to shut up and sing, and why it matters to you.)
  • HEA? No Way.
  • Proofs
  • You’ve Got Mail

    • Breathing Room

    By

    Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketSince posting here a few weeks ago about the challenges of revising my fourth manuscript, I’ve gotten a deadline extension and a new sense of perspective. While some writers work best with clocks ticking and whips cracking, I’m not one of them. I need room to stretch out, to let the characters run wild, to let the story unfold in ways that my brain simply isn’t capable of producing on short notice.

    Now that I’ve got a little bit of breathing room, I’m fascinated by the way my imagination has risen to the occasion. I can sit down at the keyboard and allow my mind to go quiet, reaching into that deep place I was afraid I’d lost access to. Sometimes the result is as simple as expanding a two-word description into a sentence or a paragraph, permitting myself to see and feel the landscape through my characters’ eyes. Sometimes it’s the ability to see the story from a whole new point of view—another narrator’s, or a different place in time. [Read more…]

    Hell or High Water

    By

    My advice this week to aspiring writers: Try not to have a book come out in the same week as a hundred-year flood. If you’re not in the midst of it personally, you’ve probably heard about the record rainfall taking place right now across the Plains states and Texas. When it first started falling, more than two weeks ago, I never imagined the impact it would have on the release of my third novel, Heartbreak Town. I live in Texas, after all, where the saying goes that if you don’t like the … [Read more...]

    Unfinished

    By

    I recently wrote two posts called “Finished” and “Finished, Part 2” about my feelings after submitting the manuscript of my fourth book to my publisher. As you may have surmised from the title of this week’s post, I’m back at the drawing board. Having talked to my editor on the phone on Friday and subsequently receiving her chapter notes via email, I’ve got three weeks to make revisions to my manuscript in order to meet the publisher’s goal of getting the book out next spring. It’s a … [Read more...]

    Getting Naked

    By

    Over the weekend, in the collectibles section at a used-book sale, I came across a volume whose dedication contained this quote: “There is a moment of profound discouragement which succeeds to prolonged effort; when, the labor which has become a habit having ceased, we miss the sustaining sense of its companionship, and stand, with a feeling of strangeness and embarrassment, before the abrupt and naked result.” If not for the archaic language, these words could have been uttered by just about … [Read more...]

    Finished, Part 2

    By

    Since I finished my manuscript a few weeks ago, I’ve been suffering from what I can only call EHS—Empty Head Syndrome. Not only do I have zero desire to write, but I can’t concentrate. My brain flits from subject to subject, restless and prickly, trying to pin down something worthy of attention. I check out bestsellers and fat biographies from the library, read fifty or a hundred pages, then return them for a new, equally unsatisfactory batch. I watch the first few minutes of a DVD and switch … [Read more...]

    Finished

    By

    Three weeks ago, the day before the deadline stipulated by my contract, I sent the manuscript of my fourth novel to my editor. Each time I begin a book, I set out believing that this time I’ll find the magic formula, the one that will catapult me to my rightful place among other published writers: brimming with pride and confidence in my craft, if not a single-digit Amazon ranking. In reality, things follow a very different blueprint. The work often makes me grouchy and anxious. Moments of … [Read more...]

    Stand Up and Shout! (How the Dixie Chicks won 5 Grammys for refusing to shut up and sing, and why it matters to you.)

    By

    I’m probably just one of hundreds of bloggers this week sounding off on the topic of the Dixie Chicks’ sweep of Sunday night’s Grammy Awards, winning all five categories in which they were nominated, including Song, Record, and Album of the Year. A subdued but visibly triumphant Natalie Maines remarked that people had voted with their voices, and no doubt it was sweet vindication after country radio all but eviscerated the band and left it for dead after Maines’s much-publicized negative comment … [Read more...]

    HEA? No Way.

    By

    I was struck by something Vicky mentioned in her post last week about the back-and-forth between her and her publisher over a semi-upbeat ending for her book. I’ve been getting email in advance of the release of my next book from readers anxious about whether or not the story will end on a happy-ever-after note. (I’m so naïve, I had to write back to the first person who inquired about an “HEA” ending and ask what the acronym stood for.) Prior to the publication of my first book, I never … [Read more...]

    Proofs

    By

    A writer whose name escapes me (Rita Mae Brown? Virginia Woolf?) once said, “You only know the book I wrote. You’ll never know the book I meant to write.” That pretty much describes to a T how I’m feeling, having just spent the weekend reading the second set of page proofs of my new book, Heartbreak Town (due out June 26), before FedExing them back to my editor in New York this morning. For the record, I hate reading page proofs. In fact, it makes me downright frantic. Last chance!, a … [Read more...]

    You’ve Got Mail

    By

    Before I got published, I always thought that nothing could be better than actually seeing and holding copies of my books in my hands. I’ve since discovered that fan mail is a close second. Like many writers working today, I have a website with a form readers can use to contact me with their comments. In the five years since my first book came out, I’ve been lucky in that 99% of the feedback I receive is positive—especially when I hear about writers who regularly get mail that’s not just … [Read more...]