Sheepgate — Emily H. Jeffries

We've all been there: social events where we know three people and have to be introduced to fifteen. The usual, unimaginative questions will be laid upon you: Where do you guys live? How long have you been in [insert city here]? What do you do?

The last question still gives me heart palpitations. What I really want to say is, NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS I'D RATHER STARE AT YOU BLANKLY THAN SAY I'M WRITING A BOOK! But that would not be proper cocktail behavior, would it?

So here are some helpful tips for those who know a (hopeful) writer and have absolutely no idea what to say to her.

Book Business, WritingEmily H. JeffriesJuly 22, 2015Small talk, Writers Comments

Working on a Manuscript? How to Crank out a Complete Draft

Here's a made up statistic for you: 99.9% of published authors had to work around full-time jobs to write their first book. In other words, it is well within your grasp to finish a manuscript, even if you already feel your time is fully consumed. All it takes is dedication and a realistic set of goals.

So for all you lovely readers with Word documents on your laptops filed under "To Be Continued, Never," I have put together a very simple program to get your manuscript from secret status to query-time status.

7 Easy Ways to Avoid Writing Like a Newb

Some people write for years and years making the same mistakes.

The mature writer takes a good, hard look at her writing and identifies the weaknesses. The immature writer fights to the death for every word she wrote as though it was inspired scripture. The latter might die with all her self-confidence in tact, but she won't die a better writer.

Revising, Story, Writing, Book BusinessEmily H. JeffriesJune 16, 2015Comment

Battling Battles: What Makes Writing Combat So Challenging?

Writing an epic fantasy is super fun. There are magical forces to conjure up, heroic characters to mold, cities and landscapes to create ... and, eventually (womp, womp), a battle to write.

Some fantasy writers, to be sure, love to write battles. For them, the whole story has been building up to this height of conflict, when bad guy meets good guy and the fate of Middle Earth is on the brink. But, I gotta tell ya, I loathe writing battles.

Writing, StoryEmily H. JeffriesJune 2, 2015 Comments

Writing Brings Out the Worst In Me

t's a difficult thing: deciding whether a career is good for you. If there's no glamor in it, we wonder why we aren't chasing our dreams. If there's no money in it, we enviously scroll through facebook pictures of friends with newly minted graduate degrees. If there's glitz and money in it, but no chicken soup for the soul ... well, frankly, I wouldn't know what that's like. But, I can imagine those people also can feel there's something better out there.

The trick is to analyze unhappiness.

First Pages: Will Agents Like How My Novel Starts?

So far, my biggest hurdle in writing a novel has been the first few pages.

There is an insane amount of pressure to make the first pages of your manuscript mind-blowing, and more than a few "guidelines" have been provided by literary agents and publishers alike. The problem is, these guidelines aren't exactly a recipe for a brilliant book so much as they are ways to cut back on the number of pages a member of the publishing industry has to read before he feels justified in shooting the manuscript down.

Here are some classic rules for the first ten pages of a novel that I have come across in my research:

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