Madeline Smoot

Last time we thought about what we wanted to achieve with our goals. This week we’re going to ask ourselves the next question in our goal setting: Question 2: How will I do it? We made goals that are actionable, but how exactly are we going to do them? We’re going to...

The Earth has spun around the Sun one more time, and you know what that means. Time to restart our goals for the year. The thing is, we often don’t make goals we can actually accomplish. At least, I used to make goals that I couldn’t actually accomplish. So a while...

Sometimes you don’t have tons of time to produce lots of writing. You may have run up against a hard deadline. You may be trying to build your self-published backlist. You may be participating in #NANOWRIMO and trying to write a whole novel in a single month. Whatever...

It's almost upon us … #NANOWRIMO is almost here. For those of you that don't know, every November authors get ambitious and try to write an entire novel (or at least 50k words of one) in one month. And not just any month—November, the month that officially kicks off...

One page summaries can be deceptively simple. After all, you’re just distilling thousands of words into 500. What could go wrong? Ask any author that’s sat down to write a one page summary only to have it be five pages, and they’ll tell you just how difficult it can...

It’s time for everyone’s favorite part of a query! The one page synopsis! Yay!! I can just hear the phones clicking shut and fingers slamming on the ctrl+Q keys to avoid this topic. No one likes the one page synopsis. No one. But why are they the bane of every...

Query Letters answer four questions. Seriously. That’s it. That’s all they do. Yes, you’ll see posts (including mine) that will talk about query letters and break them up into paragraphs. But those paragraphs are answering four fundamental questions: 1. Why is this...

As creatives, we often have no shortage of ideas. In fact, one of the challenges can be sticking to an idea and seeing it all the way through to the end. I don’t know how many times I’ve been mid-book only to get what feels like an even better, more interesting idea....

When it comes to writing a children’s book (or a YA), the characters are the most important part! No matter how cool your concept is, if your characters aren't compelling, readers won't care enough to go on the journey with them. So, who is the book about? Here are...