Tag: writing (page 1 of 1)

man with books - revision
September 2, 2025 / 0 Comments

In the Trenches: Revision Modes/Moods

After a scheduled visit to the dentist on Labor Day morning (!) and some shopping, including a visit to The Happy Book Stack, an excellent new bookstore in the next city over, Pleasant Grove, I had several hours yesterday to dig into my last beta reader’s responses to my novel. She gave me three pages of general notes in a Word doc and marked up the manuscript with lots of little stuff. As I began to process her notes, I pondered what I thought was my emotional response to detailed criticism, but turned out to be something else.

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peach and milkshake - writer things
September 1, 2025 / 0 Comments

In the Trenches: Writer Things

I haven’t blogged here in a long time. Writing (including revising) my fiction comes first—after the day job and a bit of moonlighting—and I’ve been struggling to find time for it, let alone my other writing.

Writer Things

I have a folder in my electronic to-do list called “Writer Things,” and I’ve been rather busy with those. These things are not writing or revising fiction or even writing about writing, but a lot of them are fun. They include teaching at conferences, board work for the League of Utah Writers, my Writer of the Year adventures (wasn’t expecting those), and a host of other writing-adjacent tasks, including a lot of what I’m doing this weekend.

. . . And a lot of what I did last week, in the evenings. Tuesday evening, for example, I drove to Brigham City to teach a group of writers there. They offered me a few dates, and I took the September one, so there would be fresh peaches in the peach shakes at Peach City, and there were.

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