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What I do know a little something about is social media marketing including graphic design and copy writing. I want to provide some tips and some ideas for what you may want to post at different levels of your career. Because, yes, it’s “best practices” to start before you’re published! Let's build your author social media account.

We’d all love for writing to be just that, but in the current climate we have to be marketers, accountants, publicity agents, lawyers, copy writers, graphics designers, editors, community moderators… I’m sure there are a dozen other hats authors wear on the reg.

What makes reading like a writer different from reading as just a reader? It mostly comes down to wow versus how. As a reader we’re interested in enjoying ourselves and simply saying wow at the end of a book or during the best scenes. A writer, however, will ask: how did they accomplish that wow?

Here we will dive into the crux of plot (conflict) and some of the craft elements that help you guide your readers' experience of the narrative. Within plot we have conflict, the internal why of your story. And within conflict we have its expression through tension, pacing, and stakes. There is a secondary why to your story though, an external one. The purpose of the story, the relatable truth of your story, the theme. And there’s a final piece: how your story is written that

Welcome to summer writing prompts, the fourth seasonal prompt post on this here blog. I’ll certainly continue posting prompts every quarter, but we may stray from the seasonal theme. I’m not sure what direction we’ll go; I might have to wait for the inspiration to strike.I said last time that summer didn't really scream a genre to me and that hasn’t changed. What summer does scream to me is being outside and gallivanting. Summer is soaking up the sun, heading to the cottage f

This is a writing challenge that takes you from idea generation, through the outline and writing process, and all the way to (fingers-crossed) publication. I love the wide range of stories that can come from a single prompt, but we usually see this from a multiple writer’s perspective. I thought it might be fun for an individual to see what different stories they can come up with from the same idea seed. So that’s the basis of this challenge.

Just because you aren’t putting words on a page doesn’t mean you aren’t writing. There is so much that falls outside the words on paper stage that is still the writing process. I think it’s important to talk about this because there is such a focus on hitting word counts in writer spaces, and I just want to assure you that hitting word counts isn’t the only thing to celebrate.

The Seven Point Story Structure was created and popularized by Dan Wells and focuses on structure as a plotting device where previous structures we’ve discussed, while great for plotting, are also useful for analyzing. That isn’t to say you can’t analyze a story using the Seven Point structure, just that its primary purpose is for plotting. You will see some very obvious similarities to the Classic Roller Coaster but also a huge deviation. The strength of the Seven Point stru

We’ve talked about editing your first draft and tips and advice for those big picture items, but what about when you know your story is finished but in need of tiny tweaks and polishing? That’s what we’ll look at today, sentence level edits. Sentence level editing comes in a few forms, stylistic, copy (or grammar and spelling), and proofreading. The last one, we’ll get to at a later date but we will consider both style and grammar today.

In this installment of the CTRL+F series, we’re going to talk about confidence in your writing and how to stop hedging. Let things be, and be confident in what they are. This list might be the one with the most nuance when compared to both Show Don’t Tell and Avoiding the Vague, Weak and Simply Unnecessary; I feel like we started at the “almost always” and worked ourselves down to the voicy-est list.

So you’ve written a short story (or maybe a poem or essay) and you’d like to see it published; how do you go about submitting it to literary journals? This post plans on walking you through finding and choosing the right journal(s) for you, what simultaneous submissions are, submission guidelines and industry standards for when pieces are missing, the difference between a cover letter and a query letter, and finally, reasons you may want to track your submissions and how.

Everything you’ve read about Freytag’s Pyramid is WRONG! Okay not everything, and it’s possible you have read correct information, but as I delved into this story structure I was immediately confused, because it seemed to be exactly like the Classic Roller Coaster. Freytag’s Pyramid is a character focused structure for tragic narratives. While it has some similarities in visual depiction to the Roller Coaster, it is clear that the timeline shifts.

My biggest reason for suggesting an outline is to get the thoughts out of your head. By creating an outline (no matter how detailed) you can focus on the task at hand (like writing this scene) rather than continuing to be distracted by all the other scenes and ideas you want to write. You can have the basic idea down somewhere, so you don’t have to worry about remembering it.

I realized these key elements easily fall into the 5 W’s which we often discuss in non-fiction writing (particularly journalism.) Turns out they are just as important in fiction! What a big surprise… So we’ve got the who (character), what (plot), when & where (setting), how (POV) and a double serving of why (conflict and theme.)

This post includes some red flags for when we’re using vague, weak or completely unnecessary words. While leaving some room for interpretation in our writing can be good, not every vague moment is an effective one. And some words add no actual meaning, we’re just used to using them in speech, but spoken and written word require different things. With each CTRL+F suggestion, I’ve included some examples with a fix or two to create a more compelling statement.

In 2025, I finished my work placement, graduated from college, co-hosted a launch for the program’s short story anthology, and started a freelancing business. I also adopted a second cat, read more than twice as many books as I thought I could, and started taking better care of my mind and body.

Let’s talk about my first quarter goals and how I set them… I’m going to be honest with you, these goals are not exactly “SMART” or what many would consider good goals, but I know it’s going to work for me and I want to share that with you! My goals are not as specific as they could be, some are measured by “done / not done,” they ARE achievable, relevant and time bound. Maybe they’re not as bad as I think they are when I really look at it… But that’s besides the point

Fill these cold, dark winter days with a little winter magic by using these winter writing prompts. I’ve put together some inspiration which pulls on the weather, holiday traditions and I've decided to add a little fantasy bend to some of them.