By Trista Herring Baughman You have a great story idea. Or you’ve started a book, but you’re stuck. Now what? How can you go from a seedling of a story to a fully branched, deeply rooted one? If you’re a panster, you’ll likely begin by sitting down to write. If […]
by Deborah Brewer Why are people like Stephen King so sure writers need to be readers too? He said, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: Read a lot and write a lot.” But life is busy, so busy that for many […]
Well, dear wordsmiths, January seemed like a long year, yet super fast in some aspects. It’s already February! Can you believe it? PPW’s Conference is coming up in May. Get ready for 2.5 days of amazing workshops and keynote speakers! Join us for Write Drunk, Edit Sober, get a snazzy […]
by Deborah L. Brewer It’s January again, and like many of you, I’m planning for a productive writing year. Part of that planning is to consider what might impede my progress and strategize ahead of it. A lack of time? Schedule writing on the calendar. A lack of energy? Cut […]
Part 1 – A Chat with Aaron Reynolds Children’s literature is a genre that is dear to my heart, as I’m sure it is to many of yours. It’s a varied genre, including books, magazines, poems, and stories created especially for children. Modern kid-lit is classified by either genre or […]
An Interview by Deborah L. Brewer Have you wondered about teaching a writing class or workshop? There are well over 100 recurring writers’ conferences in the United States alone. And that doesn’t include public library programming, or even PPW’s regular Write Brain events. What are the benefits of teaching a […]
By AJ Metzger The Journey There and Back Writing while traveling is not the same as travel writing, although the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Writing while traveling is just that, I spend 2-4 months a year traveling for work while trying to complete a novel and maintain my day-to-day existence. […]
An Interview by Deborah L. Brewer Every story, if it is to be a compelling read, needs conflict and obstacles for its protagonists to overcome on their heroic journeys. Enter, the villain, to a chorus of boos and hisses. Villains are the characters readers love to fear and hate. But […]
By AJ Metzger I’ll admit I planned for the past 3 years to participate in NaNoWriMo and each year I started strongish but all the things interfered. Mainly for me, November is a crazy busy month for planning and organizing the upcoming year for both work and home, and trying […]
By Monique Bos I’ll never forget the first Stephen King book I read: Pet Sematary. I was sixteen, and at the religious high school I attended, horror was neither part of the canon taught in class nor approved extracurricular reading. But other kids talked about how terrifying his books were, […]
By Trista Herring Baughman Hello, Dear Readers, Spooky Season is my favorite season–the (sometimes) cooler weather, the fresh, crisp air, the smell of bonfires and funnel cakes and roasted corn at the fair, barn sales, pumpkin patches, and reading my favorite horror books. If I’m being honest, I read and […]
Hello, Dear Readers, I’ve taken several writing classes recently. A lot of them cover the same topics in similar ways. But just when I think I’ve learned all the writing tips and tricks, I find something new. Out of all the tools I’ve come across, some have made a huge […]
An Interview by Deborah L. Brewer A debut novel, like other firsts, requires the mastery of various skills along a steep learning curve, including language, story mechanics, and professionalism. Like climbing Mt. Everest, publishing may be a profound personal accomplishment, but neither is achieved alone. There are other achievers along […]
By Laura Hayden “To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.” Gelett Burgess (1866-1951) Webster defines humor as “that which is comical or amusing.” It’s a flat definition for a concept that has many dimensions. But the challenge to humor isn’t defining it but recognizing and learning how to […]
By Deborah L Brewer “…kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” Thus, Stephen King famously paraphrased the words of a novelist from an earlier generation. That novelist was Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch, an Edwardian-era, Cambridge Professor of English Literature […]
By Monique Bos One of my fiction teachers observed a strict “rule of three” about descriptions. Writers, he believed, should provide three—no more and no less—descriptive details about each main character in their stories. And each detail had to convey an essential insight into the individual. He didn’t need to […]
By Catherine Dilts Gems I gleaned from workshops I attended at the 2024 Pikes Peak Writers Conference. It’s impossible to capture all I learned at PPWC 2024 in a few words, but here are some favorite quotes and nuggets of information. There was so much more! Najla Mamou – Editor, […]
An Interview by Deborah L. Brewer When I think of cozy mysteries, I often think of bookshops, tea time, quaint towns, and cats. But cozies, as these gentle, escapist novels are sometimes called, range from quirky and humorous, to historic and romantic, to realistic, contemporary tales that merely leave out […]
By Johnny Worthen My academic career was not in writing but in criticism. When I turned my powers to evil and became a writer, I used my knowledge of the inner layers of literature to create more. Thus I’ve written in more genres than any modern author should be allowed, […]
by Sam Knight Show, don’t tell, they say. And then you ask what that means, they ramble off into infinity, citing works and authors you’ve never heard of, sometimes giving their favorite examples, but they never really answer you. Probably because they can’t show you how to do it without […]
By Catherine Dilts Certain stages in life are clearly defined. Birth. School graduations. Weddings. They occur at a specific date and time. Retirement has been harder for me to pin down. My husband is still active in his career, working remotely for a medical device company. When my day job […]
(or The Importance of Having Your Story Read by a Bunch of Other People Before You Submit it for Publication) By Bowen Gillings You’ve written THE END. You did your editorial pass-through once, twice, maybe ten times or more, so you’re darn sure that story is ready for the world […]
By Marlene Fabian Stiles Every writer has gems of ideas whirling around their heads like electrons circling a nucleus. The Pikes Peak Writers’ Anthology project offers the unique opportunity to develop one of these germinating ideas into a compelling short story and who knows, it could be the genesis of […]
An Interview by Deborah L. Brewer A multi-genre author of fifteen novels and many short stories, Laura Hayden wears many hats in the publishing industry. Besides being an author, she is also the owner of the online and mobile bookshop Author, Author! providing bookstore services for writing and author events, […]
One of the most frequently asked questions authors receive is, “Where do you get ideas for your stories?” To which the answer is most often, “I don’t know.” Ideas come from all sorts of places: snippets of conversation, a misspoken word, an old telescope in your closet. Sometimes writers ponder […]
