Our blog series on plotting was well-timed to get us prepared for NaNo (even though I’m not participating).

Ready to review our whirlwind tour through the hows and whys of plotting, as well as several different methods? Good news—the free PDF of The Plot Thickens is ready!

I know several readers are doing NaNo, but many aren’t. Any votes on what we should look at next?

Is it just me, or did Saturday totally sneak up on you?

Sorry about the delay, folks. As promised, I’ve compiled the articles and advice from our aspiring author website series and website reviews into a free PDF guide.

The free Guide to Aspiring Author Websites was a bit of a challenge. Rather than including the full reviews, which are most useful to the person who received them, I’ve assembled all the advice that Kathleen and I gave into a little more general format, to apply to anyone who reads it.

The series was more popular than we’d anticipated, so we’ll be doing it again sometime soon. That’s right, we’ll be reviewing more websites. Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog to so you don’t miss the call for volunteers! Thanks to all of our brave and gracious volunteers, and thanks to everyone who commented and enjoyed our series.

Next week, we’re going to start looking at plotting methods.

Cover photo by Ben Lancaster

In the unlikely event that you’re not already reading the masterful blog of literary agent Nathan Bransford, I seriously recommend it. He’s a great resource for learning all about literary agents—what they do, how to get them, how not to annoy them and inadvertently sabotage your writing career with an ill-fated rhetorical question.

And apparently he’s also a wonderful human being, because instead of just being super kind to writers, he’s spending next week volunteering in a South American orphanage. No joke. Since he didn’t want his blog to lie fallow, he called for guest bloggers for next week. Out of over two hundred and fifty entries, guess who was one of the chosen five?

I know, can you believe it? (Um, me, guys. It was me.) So be sure to subscribe to Nathan’s blog and keep an eye out for five award-winning posts next week.

In the meantime, we’ll continue with our series on deep POV (though if my post runs on a Tuesday or Thursday, we’ll rearrange the schedule to accommodate that). And in other news, I’ve assembled our series on creating character sympathy into a free PDF guide.

Many thanks to Nathan, and I’m looking forward to the guest posts there as well as our continuing series here.