I have an important question to ask you writers on this rainy (if you’re in the tri-state area) Monday…
What part are you good at?
YALit
Learning From the Masters: The Meet-Cute Part IV
No series on writing meet-cutes would be complete without quoting the master of the contemporary YA romance: Stephanie Perkins.
MK’s Book Reviews: The Book Thief
It has recently come to my attention that not everyone has read this amazing important book. If you are among this unfortunate group of people, please read on…
Learning from the Masters: The Meet-Cute Part III
The Best Series of All Time (according to me)
Since getting embroiled in yet another series I love, I’ve been thinking about my favorite series (plural) of all time…
MK’s Book Reviews: My Life Next Door
So after this book, I was in need of an antidote, in the way of some lighter fare. I chose Huntley Fitzpatrick’s My Life Next Door.…
On Writing YA Contemporary
For my first novel, the only people I had reading and critiquing it were friends and family. Which was awesome for my ego–not so awesome for my work.
For my second novel, I actually did what the internets have been advising me to do–I searched for critique partners. And I actually found two!
More on that process later, though–what I really want to talk about is something one of these wonderful critique partners pointed out to me: that my YA contemporary novel was not, in fact, YA contemporary.
Friday Things
After an amazing wedding weekend (my boyfriend’s sister’s) it was hard to return to real life this week.
Learning from the Masters: The First 250 Words
I’m currently revising the first book I ever wrote. After many years of debate, I’ve decided to definitively kill my darling of a prologue and start right away with the main story.
I wrote before about the importance of the first 250 words of your manuscript and I’ll probably write about it again because it was something I didn’t get right away, as a writer. I thought to myself, this book is good–especially the end! But no one will get to the end if they don’t get past the beginning.
So! Revising again. And for help, I’m pulling the first 250 words of both favorite novels and popular novels, even ones I didn’t particularly love. Because you can always learn from the success of others, even if you don’t agree with it.
So on to today’s excerpt…
MK Pagano 