This Week’s Five!!!

Yikes! It has been a while! Anyways, here are five recent things that have brought a smile to my face or that I’ve found interesting.

YAKFest 2017!

What in the world is YAKFest? It’s the Young Adult Keller Book Festival. This was my second year attending, and man how this event grew from a couple of years ago! It was so exciting to see a packed auditorium ready to take on a day of meeting authors and listening to them speak and finding new books to read! Below is a Twitter “Moment” I created of #YAK17. I attended with my wonderful mother-in-law!

This Week’s Five!!!

Okay! It’s that time again. Time to recount a few things that made me happy–or I found interesting–in the past two (oops) weeks!!!

1. I had a lot of fun gathering up my thoughts and finally posting my huge #GardenWithJulia update.
2. My writing this year has been rather sporadic, and part of that is due to feeling overwhelmed or frustrated or lost. This post, however, speaks to me, and I hope to pick the pen up again soon.
3. In the same container I found the frog living in, I’ve also found a toad. I’m not sure if the frog has been evicted or if the two are roommates, but it’s fun to observe.
4. I’ve eaten enough sugar that I should probably take cover if it begins to rain…
5. Speaking of rain, we got a little bit of summer rain recently. It was really nice.

So what’s something that has made you happy lately?

#NTTBF16 Recap

Wow, I know this is a little late, but better late than never, right?

I was lucky enough to be an attendee at the North Texas Teen Book Festival again this year. I also had the fortune to attend the luncheon and panels on the educator day with my mother-in-law.

Mother-In-Law meeting Jonathan Maberry

I enjoy so much getting to listen to the authors speak about doing what they love, but also being reminded that they are human and have struggles, just like the rest of us.

One of the things that is interesting to hear is how these authors, all of them successful, all have different processes. (If you want to know how I feel about that, check out these posts.)

Here are some of the other tidbits I gleamed from NTTBF this year.

STORY 1 -Fiercely Fantastic Panel – ON STORIFY

STORY 2 – Paranormal Tendencies Panel – ON STORIFY

And of course, listening to these authors make me want to read their books. Some of those I’ve added to my list are Cindy Pon, Jonathan Maberry, Sarah Rees Brennan (she was added last year, I still haven’t got to her books), and Natalie Lloyd (my understanding is that her books are more MG, but I don’t mind 😉 )

Since I’m writing this at such a late date, it may be fun to add that while I was at Dallas Fan Expo, I wore by NTTBF shirt and promoted it to the local teens that stopped by the booth.

I love this event. I look forward to one day being able to volunteer to help (I hope).

[Writing] Resource – CMOS Hyphenation Table

Do hyphens drive you crazy? Did you know that the Chicago Manual of Style has a hyphenation table for compound modifiers and commonly used prefixes*? Not only is it in the Manual, it is also available online. I love being able to reference this on my computer, especially if I’m not sitting right next to my copy of the Manual. Click here (PDF – new window) to check it out.

Compound modifiers are those multiple-word phrases that modify a noun (also called phrasal adjectives or adjectival phrases). The Manual‘s general rule is that if the modifier comes before a noun, it is hyphenated, and if the noun comes first, no hyphen is needed. Of course this is just a general rule, refer to your style guide or dictionary if you’re ever unsure.

*These are not the only times that hyphens are appropriate. The main function of a hyphen is to aid in clarity and readability.

What’s your experience with hyphens? Does their usage come easily to you, or is it something you struggle with?

 

Rhew 2 Rhew Blog Tour – Erin’s Top Ten Inspirations

Today I welcome Erin Rhew to the blog to talk inspiration!

Thank you so much for hosting me today, Julia! And hello to Julia’s readers. <waves>

Rhew 2 Rhew Blog Tour – The Importance of Book Covers

I’m so excited to be back on your blog, Julia! Thanks for having me, and hello to all you readers of Julia’s awesome blog! If you love variety, you’ve come to the right place. Julia’s got it all. Erin and I need to come over for harvest. We’ll bring biscuits and sweet tea!

Checking Your Own [Writing]

Writing a novel (or anything, for that matter) is quite a lot of work. There are quite a few “rules” and “styles” of English that ultimately become the choice of the author/editor/publishing house, with the key to “correctness” being consistency. Whether  you choose to employ a serial comma is up to you, but do it consistently throughout. Whether you choose to put a character’s thoughts in italics, single quotations, or leave them to be inferred by the reader, do it consistently.

But what about things like names of people and places? Especially if you’ve made them up? I’ve worked on several projects where a person or place’s name has changed throughout. Here’s my solution. Choose which one is “correct.” Do a search and find for any other alternatives that might have turned up. Make sure they are consistent.

You may also want to do the same for commonly misspelled/misused words and words that you know you have a tendency to overuse.

Remember, an editor should catch these things, but the cleaner the manuscript you send to an editor, the more they can focus on catching the bigger problems (check out #4 on this list from Katie McCoach, and read the rest of it, too).

Have you ever found an inconsistency such as these in your own works? How did you go about correcting it?

[Writing] Dialogue – The Basic Mechanics

I have previously admitted to having some issues with dialogue, and I thought it would be useful to have all my reminders in the same place, so why not share those with you? My problem mostly comes with capitalization, and it gets tiring to keep looking these up. Frankly, while there are some sites I like, I don’t like having to sort through a bunch of places to find what I’m looking for.

Finding the Right [Writing] Revision Process

I finished the first draft of my novel, now what?

Much like the writing processes and habits, the revising process varies from one person to another. No matter what order is the most effective for your process, there are some shared steps to take.