Search Results for: A Drift of Quills

NaNoWriMo 2014!

Greetings, dear readers! It’s the first Friday of the month, and time for A Drift of Quills to get together and chat about books and writing. You may also have noticed that it is November, and November means NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). While Patricia is off flitting about the countryside, Kristie and I are knee-deep into the crazy, wonderful writing frenzy that is NaNoWriMo. Do you know what that means? Hundreds of thousands of people around the world leap headlong into the challenge of writing a novel (50,000 words long!) in thirty days. (Though if I wrote through Thanksgiving Day, […]

The Author’s Secret Sauce

It’s the first Friday of October. Already! You know what “first Fridays” mean, right? It’s the coming together of A Drift of Quills to chat about different aspects of reading and writing. It’s the latter we’re focusing on this time, with two questions we often get: Where do we get our story ideas? How do we keep track of them when they come to us? And joining us today we have author Joshua Grasso. Please give him a warm welcome! JOSHUA GRASSO Author of The Count of the Living Death and The Astrologer’s Portrait Joshua’s blog My ideas always come from the same source: […]

Books We Love

Welcome to the Friday Feature of our Fantasy writers group, A Drift of Quills! We Quills get together once a month to chat up aspects of reading and writing. We’re returning to the topic of books we love best—and this will be something we revisit from time to time, because hello! we’re readers *and* writers. Being a writer (or an editor) changes the way one reads things. It’s not strictly for entertainment anymore, but how cool is it to do your favorite thing for work? Still, the quality of a book obviously affects enjoyment. For me to forget about the […]

Picture This!

Welcome to the Friday Feature of the Fantasy writers group, A Drift of Quills! We Quills get together once a month to chat up aspects of reading and writing. This month we’re choosing a picture we think best represents some person, place or thing in one of our works. I don’t know about you, but I love seeing the pictures that have inspired my fellow authors in their writing. Sometimes their choices are surprising, and at others I nod my head madly and say yes, yes! So—wanna see what we’re envisioning? Read on! The character Crow, from my novel As the […]

The Freedom Conundrum

“The Freedom Conundrum…” Sounds like it could be the title of an exciting thriller, doesn’t it? (Must add it to my list of ideas!) It’s the first Friday of the month—and Independence Day, to boot! What better day for A Drift of Quills to talk about what freedom means to us individually and how the topic figures (or not!) in our novels? It’s not all about baseball and apple pie, though. Joining us today is guest poster, author Raymond Bolton. Please give him a warm welcome! RAYMOND BOLTONAuthor of Awakening: The Ydron Saga Vol. 1Raymond’s WebsiteFreedom is a difficult concept to wrap […]

Authors + Readers + Pinterest = Connection and Creation

It’s time for another Panel Discussion! This month A Drift of Quills is discussing how to use Pinterest to build worlds and connect with readers. You know what this means?? You, Dear Reader, get a look behind the scenes… YOURS TRULY Author of As the Crow Flies and two short stories My website (You can use this link or you could use the menu at the top. Whatever floats your boat!) I love Pinterest. If you haven’t been to the site, it’s an awesome visual discovery tool. Sometimes I spend more time on the site than is practical, but it’s such […]

Books We Love

Welcome back to the Friday Feature of our Fantasy writers group, A Drift of Quills! We Quills get together once a month to chat up aspects of reading and writing—and this time we’re talking about books we love best. Grab your chocolate, sit back, and get comfy. KRISTIE KIESSLING Author of the short story, Sanguis Dei and a poetry collection, Light and Dark Kristie’s Blog  When faced with the topic for this first Friday, Books We Love, I immediately considered the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but a commentary or review of any of those would take far […]

A Question of Honor

This month A Drift of Quills is asking our protagonists an important question: “Do you consider yourself honorable? Why or why not?” What a fun thing to do—fun to respond to, and fun to read what’s going through the minds of other characters. As you will see, they’re all quite different, but equally engaging. You might notice that we’re down by one panelist. C.M.J. Wallace has decided to resign in order to better focus her attention on other things (you know, like writing!?). We will certainly miss her wit and candor—but hopefully we’ll be able to convince her to visit now and then […]

Double Delight With Traditional and Indie Books

Our panel project, A Drift of Quills, is still in its infant stages, but I look forward to our posts on the first Fridays of the month. My fellow Quills are fun to work with, and I love seeing what responses each of them have to the topics we’ve selected. I hope you do, too! Without further ado… C.M.J. WALLACE Author of The Rift Series (beginning with Sing the Midnight Stars) C.M.J.’s Website For this month’s topic, we decided to identify one traditionally published and one indie-published fantasy novel that we enjoyed and explain why. My fellow Quillers won’t know this […]

A Drift of Quills

Content Rating: What the Bleep?!

It’s panel time! Today, A Drift of Quills is focusing its attention on content ratings. Not on the ratings of our works by readers, but of our works for readers. These ratings, adopted from the motion picture industry, differ by country, but we’ll be referencing the current—as of 2013—U.S. system. (See more at Wiki’s Motion Picture Rating System  and the Motion Picture Association of America (What Each Rating Means). What are our positions, or what difficulties might we have writing things rated beyond a PG-13? Do we write such things? Why or why not?     PATRICIA REDING Author of […]