by Stephanie Morrill
You may have noticed that I’m not Rachel Coker.
I know I said yesterday that Rachel was going to be posting today, but we had to do a little bit of schedule shuffling around here … so you have me instead. She’ll be back on in a couple weeks – yay!
I think it’s important at the end of the year to not only considering what we want to accomplish in the next year, like we talked about yesterday, but also to remember all the great stuff you learned this year that you’ll be taking with you.
The importance of “the man” in a story: I realized back in January that a common thread in several popular YA series was that the main character was up against a government authority of some kind.
How to incorporate love languages into my stories: Many thanks to Jill for introducing this concept to me!
The importance of and diversity among kick-butt heroines: A Go Teen Writers’ reader asked me a question about this, and it was something I hadn’t yet spent much time thinking about.
Why I’ve always struggled so with middles and how to fix it: While I’ll probably always think middles are the hardest part of writing a book, I feel much better equipped for facing them.
And that ultimately I’m not in control of the commercial success or failure of my novels. All I can do is my best with my part of the process – write the best story I can, market it to the best of my abilities, and turn loose the rest. My husband has been awesome about repeating this to me when I’m stressing out. Sorry, honey, I’ll probably have to learn this one again in 2013…