SPA Girls Podcast – EP356 – Running With Your Ideas
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This week we talk about how to find new ideas, and how to use those ideas in new ways. How to find them in the everyday hustle and bustle of our lives, and how to turn them on their heads to create something intriguing and interesting to our readers.
We go through a series of story starters, of intriguing kernels that you can use to create an awesome story that your readers will love to read…
SHOW NOTES:
Places to find ideas:
🌺 Invent something from irritation – create a list of everything that annoys you, and try to find a way to use it in your writing.
🌺 Change the weather – put in a storm, make it rain, put them in a heatwave. All things that will change how the characters will act.
🌺 Use writing prompts – for example Reedsy writing prompts – https://blog.reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts/
🌺 Create something from a mash up – for example two tropes that don’t usually go together. An example could be Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
🌺 It can be something small – one of the characters in Wendy’s book has a pet duck and her readers love it.
🌺 Find something funny about a particular situation.
🌺 Adjust the focus – write it from a different character’s viewpoint, or put the scene in a different setting, or take them out of their comfort zone, like a fish out of water scene.
🌺 Do the opposite – flip, reverse, and rotate. Make the familiar strange.
🌺 Turn up the heat – make things worse for your characters, add to their troubles.
💗 The SPA Girls podcast is sponsored by everyone who supports us Patreon.
Buy us a coffee from $3/month! If you join us on the $10 tier, you’ll have access to us (warts and all!) in our private Facebook group for authors, where we discuss all things self-publishing and answer your questions.
www.patreon.com/spagirlspodcast
All SPA Girls Podcast Episodes, Resource Links and free Self-Publishing Info at www.SelfPublishingAuthorsPodcast.com
SPA Girls Podcast – EP345 – How To Write A Successful Series
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Do you want to learn how to design a series that will hook and keep readers, AND set you up for long term success? Helen Scheuerer, YA fantasy author of the bestselling series, The Oremere Chronicles and the Curse of the Cyren Queen quartet, joins us today to discuss how we can write a successful series.
Topics covered include:
The REAL reasons you should write in a series
How to find and use your target market to satisfy hungry readers
How to use foreshadowing and cliffhangers to create binge-worthy instalments
How to protect your career with series exit and expansion strategies
And lots more!
About Helen
How To Write a Successful Series will be available August 11th, 2022 so go ahead and pre-order now!
Helen Scheuerer is the YA fantasy author of the bestselling series, The Oremere Chronicles and the Curse of the Cyren Queen quartet. Her work has been highly praised for its strong, flawed female characters and its action-packed plots. Her books have often been likened to Sarah J Maas’ Throne of Glass series, and the epic #girlpower film, Wonderwoman.
Helen’s love of writing and books led her to pursue a Bachelor of Creative Writing, majoring at the University of Wollongong and a Masters of Publishing at the University of Sydney. Now a full-time author, Helen lives amidst the mountains in New Zealand and is constantly dreaming up new stories.
💗 The SPA Girls podcast is sponsored by everyone who supports us Patreon.
If you join us as a $10 Patreon patron, you’ll have access to us (warts and all!) in our private facebook group for authors, where we discuss all things self-publishing and answer your questions.
www.patreon.com/spagirlspodcast
All SPA Girls Podcast Episodes, Resource Links and free Self-Publishing Info at www.SelfPublishingAuthorsPodcast.com
SPA Girls Podcast – EP342 – Interview with Mary-Theresa Hussey
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Ten Mistakes Authors Make With Their Editing & How To Fix Them
Today we’re thrilled to welcome editor extraordinaire, Mary-Theresa Hussey, to the SPA.
Prior to becoming a freelance editorial consultant, Mary-Theresa (known as Matrice) worked at Harlequin for more than 25 years, editing nearly a thousand titles. As editor, senior and executive editor, she read, acquired, revised, rejected and critiqued triple that. Many of the books she has edited went on to find places on both the NYT and USA Today bestseller lists.
Matrice shares the top ten mistakes she sees authors making and how to fix them! This is an incredible episode, packed with great info for writers at all stages of their careers. Bonus – it’s a long and juicy episode filled with amazing expert advice to help you polish your writing.
Guest Bio:
Mary-Theresa Hussey—also known as Matrice—knew from the start she loved the stories found in books—and that she didn’t want to be a writer. So she became an editor, putting her love of books to good use by helping authors write better stories.
Prior to becoming a freelance editorial consultant, she worked at Harlequin for more than 25 years, editing nearly a thousand titles. As editor, senior and executive editor, she read, acquired, revised, rejected and critiqued triple that. Many of the books she has edited went on to find places on both the NYT and USA Today bestseller lists.
Matrice is an award-winning editor, including the RWA Vivian Stephens Industry Professional award in 2015, the OCC Helping Hands Industry Award, Editor of the Year Award from the NYC RWA and multiple RITA and National Readers Choice Award nominees and winners among others).
She loves a good story and wants to make sure it’s well told.
Find her at http://www.goodstorieswelltold.com/
Resources mentioned:
Tiktok – follow @iamthatenglishteacher for grammar and punctuation tips
KM Weiland’s Structuring Your Novel (https://www.amazon.com/K-M-Weiland/e/B002RCXQ00/)
Enneagram : https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-descriptions
Myers Briggs: https://www.truity.com/test/type-finder-personality-test-new
Purdue Writing resources: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/grammar/index.html
SPA Girls Podcast – EP340 – Successful First Drafts
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Hit the ground running with this episode all about how to successfully finish the first draft of your novel!
We talk about how we stay motivated, what you need to know before you can start, how we keep going when we get to the saggy middle, what we plan beforehand, and what we leave to figure out as we go.
If you’ve been struggling to get started on your first draft, or you’re wallowing somewhere in the middle, this is the episode for you!
SPA Girls Podcast – EP338 – Psychology Tools For Authors
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Struggling to write compelling characters and compelling but realistic conflict in your stories? Well, have we got a show for you!
Darian Smith is a prize winning fiction writer with a degree in psychology, and is a member of the New Zealand Association of Counsellors. He combines these two sides of his background to provide simple, easy to follow tools that make use of established psychological theory to help writers develop fully rounded, interesting, realistic characters and inject conflict into their stories.
We cover plot development AND character development and you’ll come away (hopefully!) with some awesome tips to improve your story telling and create compelling characters that your readers will love – or love to hate!
Along with his fiction, Darian has written The Psychology Workbook for Writers: Tools for Creating Realistic Characters and Conflict in Fiction https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0143K2MNU/
You can find him at http://www.darian-smith.com/
About Darian Smith
I’m a writer and reader of fiction and live in Auckland, New Zealand. While I have dabbled in non-fiction, my true love is crafting exciting stories that interest and move me – and hopefully my readers! I mainly write fantasy. I’m a member of SpecFicNZ, an organisation for writers of speculative fiction here in New Zealand, and also of RWNZ. I’ve won the Koru award and the Sir Julius Vogel award. My literary agent is Word|Link. In my day job, I’m a Fieldworker for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. I’m also a counsellor/family therapist. I live with my beautiful partner, who is also a writer, and two naughty black cats named Apollo and Athena. The cats don’t write.
💗 The SPA Girls podcast is sponsored by everyone who supports us Patreon.
Your support allows us to create the weekly show for self-publishers, as well as for us to take time away from our own writing to produce it. Thank you so much! If you’d like to join our supporters community, click here to be a patron of SPA Girls.
All SPA Girls Podcast Episodes, Resource Links and free Self-Publishing Info at www.SelfPublishingAuthorsPodcast.com
SPA Girls Podcast – EP333 – MM Romance With Jay Hogan
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Jay is a 2020 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Gay Romance and her book Off Balance was the 2021 New Zealand Romance Book of the Year.
She is a New Zealand author writing mm romance and romantic suspense, primarily set in New Zealand. She writes character driven romances with lots of humour, a good dose of reality and a splash of angst. She’s travelled extensively, lived in many countries, and in a past life she was a critical care nurse, nurse educator and counsellor.
Jay is owned by a huge Maine Coon cat and a gorgeous Cocker Spaniel
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