The Writing Forge

Prolific romance author and publisher Bernadette Marie brings her experience with the genre to help Miranda and Bonnie nail down the differences between Romance as a genre and romance as a B-plot in a greater story. Along the way, they’ll talk about the different aspects of romance from the importance of setting, to building relationships between characters, to different “spice” levels.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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Cover art by Maggie Walker

Links:

https://www.5princebooks.com/

https://www.romancingthebeat.com/

Erin Austin, teacher and author of The Ultimate Guide to Selling Your Original World Language Resources, talks with Bonnie and Miranda about how to find time and motivation for your writing while balancing all other aspects of your life. 

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Cover art by Maggie Walker

Dr. Melanie Peffer, author of Biology Everywhere, joins Bonnie and Miranda for this episode’s discussion of the old adage “Write what you know.” Whatever their day job is, any writer can utilize their day-to-day experiences to inspire and strengthen their writing.

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Cover art by Maggie Walker

Bonnie and Miranda welcome in Season 2 of the show by discussing goal setting for writers. It’s important to define what your goal as a writer is, and we discuss four broad paths you can take to define what kind of writer you want to be.

Thanks for listening, we can't wait for the amazing guests and information coming up this season.

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Cover art by Maggie Walker

Links:

Shutupwrite.com

habitica.com

On this holiday special of The Writing Forge, Bonnie and Miranda get in the Christmas spirit by discussing the movie The Man Who Invented Christmas. Though the movie is a historical fiction take on Charles Dickens writing A Christmas Carol, it has a lot of relevance to modern writers. We cover a range of topics from publishing vs self publishing, traditional book binding, tropes about authors, and the writing process. 

Happy holidays and we’ll see you all again in Season 2!

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Cover art by Maggie Walker

Humor writer Julie Vick joins us this week to talk about all things funny.

Tips and Tricks:

• Surprise is a key element for writing humor. Play up the unexpected. The rule of three is part of this.
• If you’re going to be satirizing someone directly, make sure not to “punch down.”
• You don’t having to be funny on the first draft. Editing can and should make things funnier.
• Read your work out loud to judge your comedic timing
• Put the funniest bits at the end of a paragraph.
• Analyze reading that you find funny to figure out how the writer did it.
• Your type and level of humor will depend on your genre. Make sure to think about your intended audience as you’re crafting jokes.
• Humor can work differently in fiction vs. nonfiction, particularly if you’re writing fiction in a 3rd person POV. Formatting like footnotes and parentheses and italics can change how your funny elements come through in the end.
• Humor can carry the reader along so they don’t pay as much attention to other aspects of the writing.
• Certain phonemes are inherently funnier than others. Saying “Tropicana” is funnier than saying “orange juice.”
• Comparisons can be very helpful for adding humor to writing.

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Cover art by Maggie Walker

Lawyer, author, and publisher Thea Rademacher, of Flint Hills Publishing, joins Bonnie and Miranda to talk about common copyright misconceptions writers have as well as ways to protect and strengthen your copyright.

Tips and Tricks:

• As soon as you’ve written something original, you own the copyright to it. Copyright law, under the umbrella of intellectual property law, protects the intangible asset of your writing.
• Make sure to provide for your writing in your will. Can your heirs publish your unpublished works? Who gets the royalties for published books? Etc.
• Three best practices for strengthening your copyright:
• Register it with the US Copyright Office—perhaps not on your very first rough draft, but once you have a respectable draft that you’re ready to pitch to agents and publishers if you’re traditional publishing.
• For self-publishing, buy your own ISBN instead of using Amazon’s free one.
• Apply for a Library of Congress control number
• Tech solutions to help protect your copyright
• Bowker’s CopyrightsLock service (though it might be overkill for most authors)
• The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act (CASE Act) of 2020 provides new options for authors
• Check out Thea’s book, Authors Beware: Arm Yourself With Knowledge to Avoid Legal Pitfalls! for a ton more information about common legal issues writers run into.
• Always consult an actual lawyer before making legal decisions!

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Cover art by Maggie Walker

Amanda Headlee joins Miranda and Bonnie to discuss subgenres and tropes—their similarities, differences, and how you can utilize either to strengthen your writing.

Tips and Tricks:

• Properly identifying your subgenre can be important for marketing and successful sales.
• Sometimes a trope becomes popular and used enough to set up a whole subgenre.
• Depending on how much your story relies on a certain idea can determine whether it’s a trope or a subgenre.
• Subgenres and tropes are useful for setting reader expectations. If you’re heavily emphasizing certain tropes or aspects of your genre at the beginning of your book, then swap at the end you will probably confuse and disappoint your readers.
• Some tropes help move a story forward, but be wary of overusing common tropes and slipping into stereotypes and cliches.
• Genres go in cycles, with some subgenres becoming more popular then fading from popularity. What you see being traditionally published.

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Cover art by Maggie Walker

In this twofold Halloween episode Miranda and Bonnie talk with Steve Anderson about how to write for Kindle Vella as well as how to write spooky stories.

This week’s question: Have you tried out Kindle Vella? Let us know of any stories you’ve liked and link them at our socials!

Tips and Tricks:

• Kindle Vella is a new(ish) platform on Amazon that specializes in serialized content and is separate from Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Direct Publishing.
• As it is a serialized platform, the sweet spot for views and reads seems to be for the author to post about 2 -3 short “episodes” per week. About 1,000 to 2,000 words per episode, with lower 1,000s being preferable.
• When writing for Kindle Vella, it’s helpful to think of the episode as a cable TV show with commercial breaks built in. Where there would be a commercial break, that’s usually a good place to stop the episode.
• Episodes cost tokens and readers spend tokens to unlock the next episode. Different episodes cost different amounts.
• Horror, spooky, and suspenseful stories all share common traits.
• For tension, you want to feed your readers enough information to get them anticipating the next step in the story. From there you can twist the story if you’d like. You want to aim for “surprising yet inevitable.”
• Managing to generate a sense of unease or that something is “off” is a great way to build up the spooky factor of a story.
• Vella seems to be a rather ideal platform for ratcheting tension in a story, especially for stories along the lines of mystery and horror.

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Cover art by Maggie Walker

Links:

Steve’s paranormal mystery serial, If These Walls Could Talk: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-vella/story/B09WKDR3S4

Rise: An Anthology of Change, containing Miranda’s spooky short story: https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Anthology-Change-Bonnie-McKnight/dp/0578577593/

Supernatural (TV show): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460681/

Castle (TV show): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1219024/

Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files: https://www.goodreads.com/series/40346-the-dresden-files

The Others (movie): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0230600/

More on “surprising yet inevitable”: https://writingexcuses.com/tag/surprising-yet-inevitable/

Today Miranda and Bonnie are talking with Stina Branson about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short). This week’s question: Have you participated in NaNoWriMo before? If you have, or are signing up this year, drop your username in our socials—we’d love to be NaNo buddies with you!

Tips and Tricks:

● NaNoWriMo takes place in November with the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days, which roughly comes out to 1,667 words to write per day.

● A traditional NaNoWriMo project is to start a brand new fiction novel, however people have come to use the program for things like their dissertation, code programming, a collection of short stories, cover creation, editing, or a host of other projects.

● NaNoWriMo is ultimately a tool to help you get work done that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

● A traditional “win” for NaNoWriMo is reaching the 50k mark by November 30th, but generally we consider any new words a win, even if the website doesn’t.

○ We recommend coming up with your own definition of success.

● Some strategies to help get through NaNoWriMo: treat it like a race to see how fast you can reach your word goal; turn it into a competition, break off into teams and see which team gets the most words; make challenges: roll a die multiply the number by 100 and try to reach that number within a certain timeframe; find what really incentivizes you.

● Pantser–someone writing by the seat of their pants, also known as a discovery writer.

● Plotter–someone who plots their novel ahead of time.

● Plantser–someone who knows what direction their story is headed, but not the specifics of how to get there.

● Prepping for NaNoWriMo: You can make an outline, do research on your subject so you don’t have to stop during November, cook a lot of meals ahead of time and freeze them so you don’t have to spend as much time cooking during the month.

● If you’re looking for a NaNoWriMo community, definitely check out the website to see if there is a chapter in your geographical area. If there isn’t, search the internet for forums and groups. Also, don’t be afraid to strike out on your own and create your own.

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Cover art by Maggie Walker

Links:

NaNoWriMo Handles:

Miranda: mmiranda

Bonnie: Idriana

Sisters in Crime