Category: Marcy’s Blog
Behind the Scenes: The Official Game of Thrones Cookbook
Games of Thrones started as an epic fantasy novel, became an award-winning HBO series, and now it’s a cookbook. As soon as I found Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer’s blog The Inn at the Crossroads (with the awesome logline, “In the game of food, you win, or you wash the dishes…”), and found out they’d [...]
Read moreHow to Use Taste to Make Your Readers Hungry for More
According to Jeff Gerke of Marcher Lord Press, a successful small publisher of speculative fiction, one of the most common problems in both novice and advanced fiction is not enough description. This means that, regardless of what draft you’re working on, you probably have too little description rather than too much. The fix is actually [...]
Read moreDo We Need to Be A Little More Old-Fashioned?
If you woke up one day to find that 70 years had passed, would you be excited or would you mourn for lost friends and family and the way of life you’d known? When we meet Steve Rogers again in The Avengers, he’s still struggling with this very thing. Back in 1942, a special serum [...]
Read moreBattleship – More than Just a Board Game?
Three things entice me to watch a movie in the theater–an amazing plot, connection to a book I loved, or a romance that gives me stomach flutters. Even better if you can put those things together. But I’m going to watch Battleship in theaters. Why? For the same reason I watched Battle: Los Angeles in [...]
Read moreHow to Make Your Novel Scratch and Sniff
Do you want your reader to feel like they’re part of your world? Do you want your setting to stick with them long after they’ve closed your book? One of the best ways to bring your fictional world to life is to use all five senses. Because each sense comes with its own unique strengths [...]
Read moreDo You Ever Feel Like You Don’t Fit In?
If you’ve ever felt like you don’t fit in, you have something in common with a Viking teenager named Hiccup. Hiccup is the scrawny, clumsy, yet creative son of the Viking chieftain in the Dreamworks movie How to Train Your Dragon. No one quite understands Hiccup’s unique ways of doing things. More than anything he [...]
Read moreAre You Going to Watch Marvel’s Avengers Assemble?
Next weekend marks the release of another movie I’ve been waiting for–The Avengers! Loki, supervillain brother of Thor, has assembled an army to take over the world. Regular forces can’t stop them, so Nick Fury decides to put together a group of superheroes. My favorite, Tony “Ironman” Stark (played by Robert Downey, Jr.), looks like [...]
Read moreAre You Struggling to Control Your Inner Centaur?
I’m afraid I might be part centaur. And it’s not something I’m proud of. Centaurs in the ancient Greek world were nothing like the stargazers on the grounds of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts or the wise, noble creatures in Narnia. The most common origin legend says centaurs are descended from King Ixion of the Lapiths and [...]
Read more7 Tips for Increasing Creativity
I’ve been award the Kreativ Blogger Award from one of my favorite bloggers, a sister nerd, and just an all-around nice person—Jessica O’Neal. It’s a huge honor to receive this award from her. Thank you! As you’ve probably guessed, this award comes with some rules: 1. Thank the person who gave it to you. 2. [...]
Read moreFour Secrets About Writer’s Conference Faculty
It’s writer’s conference season again, and as someone who’s gone to multiple conferences, both as an attendee and as faculty, I wanted to share with you the top four things the faculty and presenters at writer’s conferences (including agents and editors) wish you knew. (1) We can tell from a 15 minute appointment who is [...]
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