Posted on May 4, 2012 - by Nicole Humphrey Cook

The Week’s Best Writing Posts: Friday, May 4, 2012

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. ”
- Gene Fowler

It has been forever since I did one of these posts; I think all the way back in September. After noticing some exceptional posts for writers floating around twitter, and the new facelift to the blog, I decided it was time to bring This Week in Writing back. Did you miss some of these? I have collected a lot in the past couple of weeks, hoping to do another post like this – here we are! I’ll try to get more regular about this again, since I always get comments and emails that these are great because they are missed by some.

On Agents/Editors/Querying:

• Why Every Self-Publishing Author Needs an Editor
• Hiring a Freelance Editor: A Step-by-Step Guide
• Submissions 101: Keep the Kids out of Your Author Bio
• How to vet an independent (freelance) editor
• Why it might take an agent a while to reply to your submission 
• Agents: Remember them? 
• The Importance of Reversion Clauses in Book Contracts

On Character Development & Dialog:

• Creating Believable and Well Rounded Characters (Writing for Success)
• The Starburst Method: The Character Grid
• How (Not) to Write Great Characters
• Creating characters that “jump off the page” will be covered here.
• Finding the True Protagonist of Your Story
• 8 Tips for Naming Characters
• Tips for writing villains
• How do you get away with basing characters on people you know? 
• The Key Ingredient for Dramatic Tension–Understanding the Antagonist
• Here’s some interesting thoughts about writing strong female characters

On Genre Specifics:

• What contemporary fiction do you recommend for high school students?
• YA Highway: Expectations Within Genres 
• Here are a few tips on getting materials together for a travel writing article.
• The YA Genre Is Killing Itself
• Oh, Mother, Where Art Thou? Connie Brockway on Moms in Romance Novels.
• Race in YA from a Biracial Perspective — Guest Blogger Jean-Paul Bass Weighs in on the Issue 
• Some Notes Towards a Working Definition of Steampunk
• The 10 Commandments of Thrillers: The Article That Inspired John Grisham

On Publishing:

• The Secrets To Ebook Publishing Success. A Must-Read For Authors.
• Taking critique like a pro
• It’s a Business– Is Amazon an Enemy?  Or a potential ally?
• If you are a self-publisher you NEED to know about metadata. Here’s a super sexy intro.
• Wade Rouse explains How He Got Published
• Has Publishing Become a Kinky Game? Ruth Harris Talks about Writer Masochism and How to Cure It 
• Big Six Publishing is Dead–Welcome the Massive Three
• Self-Publishing Basics: Introduction to Metadata — The Book Designer

On Marketing:

• 5 secrets of getting free publicity – Sales Machine – CBS News 
• 4 Simple Steps to Creating a Vanity URL for Your Amazon Author Central Page 
• Ebooks–Pricing, Visibilty & Experimentation
• The ebook pricing monster has been slumbering in recent months
• Launching a successful blog tour
• Useful Tools and Websites to Help You Improve Your Grammar 
• Ebook Pricing: How Much Should I Sell My Book For?
• Book Marketing: Why I Gave Up Trying to Build a Big Social Media Following
• If you are about to design your own book cover, please read this first
• Author Branding: The You That Is Everywhere 

On Revision/Editing:

• How to Convert an Adjective to an Adverb 
• Writing and deadlines 
• Self-Editing Your Novel (Writing for Success)
• 36 Adjectives Describing Light

On Outlining & Plotting:

• When you get stuck
• Writing in the Third Person
• Tips for ending chapters with a bang
• 10 Things I Learned While Writing a Sequel
• 5 steps for testing your opening scene
• Are Your Scene Breaks Rude?
• 4 Simple Ways to Create a Well-Written Ebook
• Setting the Mood with your First Lines
• Perfecting Your First Page: 3 Tasks or Exercises
• Want your readers to find it impossible to put down your book? 4 tips to keep them reading

On Social Networking/Blogging & Other Online Stuffs:

• To Link or Not to Link Your FB & Twitter Posts
• Pinterest for Authors: How to Promote Your Writing on the Fastest Growing Website Ever
• Facebook or Twitter, Which Is Better for Book Promotion?
• YA Authors on Pinterest
• Jody Hedlund explains why writers need to use Pinterest
• 5 free ways to monitor your brand on Twitter
• 10 Twitter best practices for journalists…or anyone
• 12 ways Twitter makes you a better writer
• Has The Internet Made You Into A Pretend Writer? via BubbleCow

On Writing in General:

• Writing For Success: Don’t start the story at the beginning 
• How to Find Your Daily Writing Motivation: A guest post by James Chartrand of Men with Pens… 
• It’s Time to Start Your Novel: Here’s Why 
• Pushing Past Procrastination, by Melissa Foster 
• Want to be a professional writer? Act like one. 
• The importance of keeping a notebook
• Writing a novel that people want to read.
• Finding Ways to Find and Manage the Time

On Everything Else (including new, cool things, inspiration, creativity, free things and funny stuff):

• Self-Published Author Lands a book deal after 125 years! 
• A free directory of ebook pros–for covers, editing, formatting, & more
• A Writer’s Enemy: Feeling Like A Fraud
• Target to stop selling Kindles, citing “conflict of interest”
• Use the YouTube Time Machine to research your book or writing project

Did I miss anything? I’m sure I did. Please leave a comment with a link so others can find it!

Added this week: If you are interested in getting your own posts included, the best way to get me to notice you is for you to tweet me the link. I visit sites daily looking for new articles to post on twitter. I primarily use Twitter to find awesome articles – it’s full of them.

Have a great weekend, and come back next week for more!