Category: Famous quotes

Just Published! I WANNA BE a WRITER, Journal and Handbook

‘A stunning new journal with more instruction and extra tips about writing fiction, stage plays, and poetry.’ Midwest Book Review

The newest in a series of Journals/Handbooks. For new and experienced writers alike, this Journal offers more instruction,
tips and more hand-picked quotes by other authors, actors, playwrights, philosophers, and poets. Meant to inspire the creative mind.  A handy size that will fit in a backpack or tote.  

 

WHAT TO EXPECT:   
How To Begin
How To Develop Exciting Characters
How To Tell A Story
How To Write a Stage Play
How To Write Poetry
How To Write Haiku Poetry

 

To purchase: click here 
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MY BLOGS feature INTERVIEWS with  best-selling AUTHORS!   Did you miss the past few months?    September: Dylan Callens.  October’s author was Donna Kauffman. In November we say hello to Rita Avaud a Najm. In December we will be saying hello to English mystery writer, J.G. Dow. 
                                                                                   
                                         Check out more Motivational Moments…for Writers!

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 To Purchase 

 

Motivational Moments…for Writers! #32

        Discipline!   As you probably know I interview other writers, many of them best selling authors.  A constant theme among all of them is DISCIPLINE!

To be a writer, you must write. Every day. Even if it’s only for 15 minutes or an hour. Write every day.  Even if it’s crap. That’s what re-writes are about.
It’s what’s underneath that counts, which is usually just a fear of not being able to do it, or do it well, or being criticized, or a zillion other reasons not to write today. Or, simply not wanting to write badly enough–no solid motivation. Writers who procrastinate need to ask themselves why, try to get to the bottom of it. Sometimes people can try to make themselves do things they really, deep down, don’t want to do. Writing a book seems to be something everyone has on his/her bucket list, just “because.” If you really don’t want to do it, then don’t.

If anyone told you writing is easy they were lying. Writing is hard work and not for the faint hearted!

Dean Koontz told me in his Interview: ‘ I don’t suffer from procrastination because I love the English language and the process of storytelling, and I’m always curious to see what will come to me next. If you procrastinate a lot, you might be one who loves having written, but doesn’t so much like writing.’

‘We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment.’ ~~ Jim Rohnwriting, blogs, authors, creating,writers

 

‘Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.’– Ray Bradbury

‘Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.’ – Henry David Thoreau
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MY BLOGS feature INTERVIEWS with  best-selling AUTHORS!   Did you miss the past few months?     Johan Thompson (South African author)  joined us in April.   June: Mehreen Ahmed.  July: Janet Macleod Trotter, author of Tea Planter’s Daughter and in August we say ‘hello’ to Cheryl Hollon.
                                                                                   
                                         Check out more Motivational Moments…for Writers!

To receive my posts sign up for my blog, blogs, blogger, writer, author, playwright, books, plays,fiction  On the home page, enter your email address.  Thanks!

More Motivational Moments…for Writers! #8

1..girl.write..mouse_1Writers! Jump-start your day with more Motivational Moments!

“….you have to be willing to write crap.  You have to write all the time whether it’s any good or not.  You can always delete or revise or rewrite but if you wait until it feels perfect, you’ll never accomplish anything.  You have to fill up pages with words and keep moving forward…”

My interview with bestselling author Robyn Carr began yesterday ( she was so generous with her time and thoughts it became a 3 parter) and she said this in the context of the post. I couldn’t have said it better so I borrowed it! Thanks, Robyn!


“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”  Kurt Vonnegut

“To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to do.”  Kahlil Gibran

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” Edgar Allan Poe

 

Sign up for my blog and receive your ‘Motivational Moments‘ twice a week! Simple: type your email address in the box on my Home page (top/right). Click on ‘subscribe’.

‘As a writer, I marinate, speculate and hibernate.’  Trisha SugarekThe throes of writing

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DON’T MISS UPCOMING BLOGS featuring INTERVIEWS with  best-selling AUTHORS!  A long awaited interview with Kathleen Grissom (The Kitchen House) Best selling author, Robyn Carr is July’s author. Check out Motivational Moments…for Writers!

To receive my posts sign up for my blog, blogs, blogger, writer, author, playwright, books, plays,fiction  On the home page, enter your email address.  Thanks!

Motivational Moments…for Writers! # 6

1..girl.write..mouse_1Writers! Jump-start your day with more Motivational Moments!

Don’t worry about a story that you haven’t finished.  It’s okay to let it ‘rest’.  There have been times when I have had three books waiting for me to finish.  Just the other day I pulled up my GAN (great American novel) and realized that it had been ‘resting’ for over a year. Life and other stories had gotten in the way.

The good news is that it’s only about 50-75 pages from being a completed first draft.  And, I am looking at it with fresh eyes.  What a difference that makes. It’s almost like reading someone else’s work and I am revitalized and eager now to complete it and begin rewrites.

BTW, I am calling Song of the Yukon my great American novel; not out of ego but very much with tongue in cheek. Rather it is my largest effort to day and took the most research, blood and sweat.

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.” Henry David Thoreau

 

 

“It is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.”  W. Somerset Maugham

“Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon and star.” Confucius

 

 

 

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DON’T MISS UPCOMING BLOGS featuring INTERVIEWS with  best-selling AUTHORS!  A long awaited interview with Kathleen Grissom (The Kitchen House) Best selling author, Robyn Carr is July’s author. Check out Motivational Moments…for Writers!

To receive my posts sign up for my blog, blogs, blogger, writer, author, playwright, books, plays,fiction  On the home page, enter your email address.  Thanks!

Motivational Moments….for Writers! #3

 

Oh, so you think you will just write all day and wonderful things will happen?  Think again, grasshopper.  If you’re a one-man-band like myself and most other indie authors, you will have to wear an editor, publicist, marketing and publishing hat, just to name a few.
It takes hard work and then some more hard work.  But here’s the payoff:  After four years…yep..you heard me right…of consistent blogging with relevant content, supporting other writers, and interviewing authors so much more famous than I am (well, I’m not famous at all) my posts (blog) are on page ONE of Google search and my books are selling.  This year a traditional publisher picked up my true crime series of books.  Don’t misunderstand, when you get a publisher DO NOT stop publishing your indie books.  And most important of all: KEEP WRITING!

Alan.1PE2Y  “If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust.” Alan Rickman, actor

“Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.”  John Wayne

 

 

                                                ‘As a writer, I marinate, speculate and hibernate.’  Trisha Sugarek
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DON’T MISS UPCOMING BLOGS featuring INTERVIEWS with  best-selling AUTHORS! In April, a long awaited interview with Kathleen Grissom (The Kitchen House) May’s author was Jordan Rosenfeld.  Michael Saad, Canadian author, will be June’s author. Robyn Carr is July’s author.

To receive my posts sign up for my blog, blogs, blogger, writer, author, playwright, books, plays,fiction  On the home page, enter your email address.  Thanks!

Authors, Where Do You Find Your Characters?

Over and over again, I preach the concept:  ‘let it flow’, ‘let your characters take you on a journey’, ‘If it’s going well, I will happily be just the typist’.

I recently interviewed Dean Koontz and here’s what he said on the subject:

Photographer: Thomas Engstrom

“And then I start. In the first few chapters, the lead characters are forming, and I am learning who they are. I’ve often said that if I give characters free will, if I don’t plot out the story and instead present them with a problem and watch them deal with it, they begin to take on a life of their own, frequently surprising me with the choices they make. This is mysterious and exciting. When it’s going well, it’s simultaneously an intense intellectual endeavor and an almost dream-state journey of wonder and emotion.”

Author, Matt Jorgenson recently said when asked: Where do you first discover your characters?
“Initially I don’t think of them as characters. It’s kind of like arranging furniture. I need OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAsomething tall here, wide there, elegant there. I often just plop them in for the energy they lend to the development of the story. When I’m unable to sit at my laptop and write I will often sketch out backstories for some of the characters with pen and paper based on what seems reasonable according to how they act/function in the story and then weave those details back in later.”
Continue reading “Authors, Where Do You Find Your Characters?”

Time to Take a Breath…Time For a Little Poetry

crazy ladyWhat a week!  Wrangling with a small so-called, publisher and their poorly written contract, (which I turned down). Writers! Beware of scam artists that call themselves publishers!  A week of being in the clutches of an editor (just kidding…it’s a wonderful experience, writers, you should try it) and trying to survive record-breaking summer temps in Savannah.

I said to a friend, just today, (when she said she was taking a few days off but would continue to work from her mobile.)  ‘BALANCE’,  turn your phone off. Continue reading “Time to Take a Breath…Time For a Little Poetry”

Shakespeare…The Gift that Keeps on Giving

William ShakespeareThe ‘naked truth‘ is, I’ll bet you can’t count the number of times you use one or more of these euphemisms in your every day conversation.  I doubt old Will realized where his words would travel to and for how long.  We writers just hope someone will read what we write. But, to have one’s words live on, after we’re ‘dead as a doornail‘ and not ‘vanish into thin air’ decades or centuries later, well, the possibility makes my ‘hair stand on end‘.

Yeah, I’m playing with you.

William Shakespeare wasn’t born (1564) famous… Continue reading “Shakespeare…The Gift that Keeps on Giving”

A New Journal for Creative Writers…and more

1.Creative.Write.BookCoverImage                    My JOURNALS for CREATIVE WRITERS are becoming more and more popular.  The book, with a custom cover, has 275 blank, lined pages for your writing.  Tucked into the margins of each page are famous quotes from authors, writers, playwrights, poets and actors, to inspire you to WRITE!

The unique feature of these Journals/Handbooks is that I have included a ‘how to’ section (6) to get you started whether it’s for story telling, fiction, play writing, or poetry.

And don’t forget there are four custom covers to choose from; two for women, one for men, and this one for the student,teacher, writer. The quotes were customized and hand picked by me. They are available on Amazon.  Keywords:  journals,sugarek

Continue reading “A New Journal for Creative Writers…and more”

Happy Birthday, Will Shakespeare!

Richard.IIIToday is William Shakespeare’s birthday and I thought what a perfect time for dig out my old tried and true monologue that I used for 25+ years when auditioning as an actor.

When you stand in front of a director and his usual team (a stage manager, an assistant director, etc.)and you tell them your name and what monologue you will be presenting, (in my case) Lady Anne from Richard III.  I always enjoyed watching their faces; knowing the inward groan…’Oh, crap!  Not Anne again…“ I would smile knowing what they were thinking.   Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Will Shakespeare!”