Jade Varden Official Blog

Some of my best ideas come to me at the worst possible moments. I'm in the shower, I'm laying in bed, I'm stuck in traffic...and I'm getting great ideas. Entire scenes are unfolding, dialogue is racing through my mind. By the time I get the opportunity to sit down and start typing, I can no longer remember all those great ideas...and I just end up writing something else. Knowing what to do with your ideas may seem like simple, even silly advice, but if you don't find out you could end up cursing yourself later.  Inspiration Knows No Boundaries Creativity is a finicky muse. She appears without warning, and when she does she demands to be heard. You could be engaged in watching a TV show or movie, and suddenly your mind is no longer your own. It's inside your story, working out complex scenarios and imagining characters. You could be doing anything at all when creativity strikes, and that's why you've got to be prepared for it at all times .  ...

Entering contests can be time-consuming, but winning them will give you a great feeling. There are a ton of contests out there for poets, short story writers and self-published authors. If you do manage to win one of them, you can get a lot of marketing mileage out of it. And when you win, you can call yourself an "award-winning author." How fun is that? Indie Book Awards Indie authors can get plenty of love on the award circuit; I don't even have the room or time to post all the links to all the available contests. Start your search with some of the bigger contests, and keep up the hunt from there. Put all the links together in a single folder, and program the deadlines into your calendar so you don't miss them. The Independent Publisher Book Awards , Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards , the Indie Book Awards and the Indie Excellence Awards are all fairly prominent. You can find more contests at the Independent Book Publishers Association . ...

October is swiftly approaching, and with it Halloween. It's one of my favorite holidays, and it's all about being scared. That's why I'm going to (attempt to) feature only scary books on film all month long. The first installment begins with, of course, Stephen King. After a fashion, anyway. King wrote Thinner as Richard Bachman, the worst-kept secret pen name in the entire history of the written word. But the jig is definitely up, and the novel moved easily to film. Was it any better in the second medium? The Book When King first started in the writing biz, many publishers believed that authors shouldn't release more than one book a year; they thought it might over-saturate the market. According to literary legend, King invented his pseudonym Richard Bachman for this reason -- and because he wanted to see if readers were buying his words, or his name. Supposedly. As I've mentioned, the secret wasn't kept very well, and fans aren't dum...

What does it take to be an award-winning, best-selling, much-loved author? In looking at the stories of those who have walked the path of success (without falling on their faces), certain qualities shine through: grit, stubbornness, hard work...and luck.  It helps to write something new and interesting and great...but a stroke of luck can completely change your fate. Just ask one award-winner who came within inches of never being published at all.  A Wrinkle in a Perfect Plan Madeleine L'Engle was born in 1918 and spent most of her childhood in New York City, where many writers have been inspired. She wasn't much of a student, and received poor grades. Madeleine preferred writing in her journal, creating poems and making up stories. It was a habit she took with her to the French Alps, where her family moved when she was 12. She studied English in depth at Smith College, where she continued working on her own writing. Upon graduation, Madeleine moved to Gre...

As an author, it's essential to also be a reader. Authors are influenced and inspired by other greats who have taken pen to page to pour out prose. Every writer should have a reading habit bordering on addiction, because it's important to continuously build upon your craft. Reading is really research for new writing styles, new punctuation usage, tone and wordsmithery (not a word technically, but I like it).  So if you want to write a bestseller someday, doesn't it follow that you should study bestsellers of the past? Take a look at the most popular books ever written (at least, to date) and see how your work compares to the best of the bestsellers.  Still the One The trouble is, it's hard to determine just which books are actually the best . How do you determine what makes a book great? Is it good reviews? Sales? The number of people who have read it? As it turns out, the best book in one of those categories usually ranks pretty high in the others, too...

Adding dates and date-specific events to your book will make it feel more like reality, but it will also put a pretty clear expiration date on its relevancy. At some point, every contemporary book ever written stops being relevant and starts being history. There are all sorts of little things you might be adding that are dating your book. What should you do about it?  Please Sell By... Sometimes, there's just no other way to get certain plot points across, and an exact date is necessary. If there's some question of a character's age or birth place, or if someone goes to look at a grave, exact dates are going to come up. Sometimes, an exact date suits the circumstance. A character appearing in court before a judge, for example, may hear a long litany of charges and a docket number and specific dates. If the police are asking questions about a crime, they're going to use exact dates. For some writers, it's just unavoidable. But even if you're ter...

Double-spacing after a period.  Like this.  Is wrong.  But so many people have so many different opinions about double-spacing and single-spacing after punctuation, it's difficult to point to just one reason why it's wrong. I'm going to try anyway.   Single and Fabulous? The number of spaces that should be placed after a period is actually a hot point of contention among writers, editors and typographers. This is the kind of stuff that gets word nerds all kinds of hot and bothered, and I guess I'm no exception. I passionately believe that only one space should be used following any sentence, and the general school of typography agrees with me.  Typesetters are the people who actually put the words on the page. They're responsible for making everything fit together and using all the space they've got in an economical fashion. Since the early 20th century, it's been an industry standard in Europe and the Americas to use a single space, not a do...

Can't wait until Judgment (Deck of Lies, #4) comes out in November? You don't have to! Death, the third book in the Deck of Lies series, now has an exclusive preview of Judgment.  Blog readers can get Death free in any electronic format at Smashwords all week long. Use the coupon code PZ96Z to get 100% off, and get a sneak peek of what's coming up in the fourth (and final) installment of the Deck of Lies series.