500/1000 Giveaway!

Greetings, Beardies!

A while back I had mentioned on Facebook (and by default, Twitter) that, in honor of reaching 500 Likes on our Facebook Page and 1000 Followers on Twitter, I would be holding a Giveaway.

A Giveaway, there shall be...and it's a doozie! We have some great prizes, donated by some great authors. In addition to their generosity, I've decided to donate a prize of my own.

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The Prizes & Their Benefactors:

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World Building: Making Tough Choices

Hello Beardies, 

You’re familiar with the iceberg analogy: only a small fraction of the whole is visible on the surface. It applies to people, art, sports, nature, and it applies to world building. You, dear writer, should have, floating about in your brain, a berg-size mass of knowledge about the world in which your story takes place. This knowledge informs your writing and adds layers of richness to the story. Even so, only a small portion of that iceberg will surface in the story. And that means you have to make choices.

Which details about your world will get page time and which will you leave out?

 It’s a dilemma, for sure. And when life gives you dilemmas, make dilemmanade. (All together now: GROAN!)  The pun may be bad, but the point is valid. If you use this challenge to think carefully about the choices you’re making as a writer, your story will grow stronger. Here are some ideas for doing just that:

Author Spotlight: Lana Krumwiede

Happy New Year, Beardies, and welcome back!

December was a long and crazy haul, but whatever holidays you celebrated, I hope they were happy and blessed! After drowning in work and deadlines for so long, it was amazing for me to spend Christmas and New Year’s with my family. I’m back to work now, though, and we have great content brewing for you in 2013! This post has been a long time coming, so without further ado, let’s jump in!

Book Spotlight: Freakling by Lana Krumwiede

Well met and welcome back, Beardies!

I must begin this post with an apology for our absence of late.  Joshua is still steadily chipping away at his rewrites; his story gets stronger every day, but as we all know, writing is a process.  For my part, I've been busily planning programs and slinging books for my faithful minions at the library, and I recently took a little working vacation.  Vacation wouldn't be vacation without souvenirs for friends, though, so please consider this Book Spotlight (and several more to come) your treats from my trip.  :)  Back at the beginning of November, I attended the Young Adult Library Services Association's YA Literature Symposium in beautiful St. Louis, Missouri.  It was a wonderful weekend filled with new friends, awesome food, much learning about my profession and my writing craft, and best of all, tons of free books and authors to sign them!