Sabrina's Blog

Today ended the most intense, inspiring, and incredible writing workshop. I will owe Bill Bernhardt for the rest of my life. He has helped me to refine my work into something that I can not only be proud of, but that I can also say is publishable. I met the most amazing group of women, whose critiques have inspired me to create bigger and better scenes. It is amazing to be able to call each one of them friends and know that anytime I need help with overcoming any walls, they will be there for me! I am excited to return for Bill's Level 2 class on July 11th with my friends Angela and Erin. It promises to be just as enlightening. I plan to work diligently until then to finish my novel's 1st draft and begin revisions. Thanks so much to William(Bill) Bernhardt for such an amazing workshop!

It is 10:30pm and I just finished the homework assigned at my writing workshop today. I am attending the William Bernhardt 5 Day Writing Workshop this week and in class from 9am to about 1pm each day. I have been doing homework since I arrived home at around 2pm except for a short 15 minute break to fix dinner. (Yeah, it was pretty much a fend for yourself night in my house...yet somehow I still ended up preparing the 4 year old slave driver that runs my house his meal as well). I am learning so much and really enjoying the experience! I can already tell my book is better, more refined. Mr. Bernhardt really is an excellent teacher. Reading about the proper way to set up the perfect story in a book is a great resource, but finding a great teacher to give you the nuances that you don't completely understand is absolutely priceless. Having said that, this teacher really loves assigning homeworkd which has caused my brain to become total mush. So much that I a...

Though I have been raised in the computer and Internet era, I must admit that I have managed to skate by on the basics. Most of you will know what I am talking about...e-mail, online shopping, and social networking. I did not have any interest in building pages for anything on the Internet, I simply wanted to look at the ones already out there. All of that has changed, however, because I now want to be a published author and in today's market that means getting out there and creating my fan base, or platform before I actually begin the publishing process. That my friends, in an intimidating process. It is not that doing this is difficult, but that there is so much to take in while attempting it. So blogs, forums, and websites have become a real part of my thought process' as I get closer to finishing my first novel. Blogs and Forums have been time consuming, but I have managed them. I hope you noticed the updated look on this blog and like what you see because lots of trial...

   Today was the monthly meeting for my writer's group, Oklahoma City Writer's Inc. If you are a new writer and haven't looked up and joined a writer's group in your a area, I would strongly suggest that you do so! It is such a good way to network with other writers AND learn things associated with your craft.    My group likes to host workshops for the meetings in the summer months. This month author Carolyn Wall spoke on 'how to create suspense in fiction' and it was fabulous! She sent us all home with an assignment asking us to take her formula for creating suspense and overlay it on an outline for something we are working on. When told by her editor that it was time for her to write the BIG ONE, she immediately pulled all the books off her shelf that were fabulous and whose authors were still remembered and asked herself...what do they all have that has made them the BIG ONE for their author. The answer was simple: suspense.    She listed several book...

   I decided that I want to submit my first 2 chapters into a writing contest my writing group hosts each year in September. So I need to write a synopsis. Now until the conference I attended in May, I had no idea these were considered a HUGE nightmare to writers. However, I now fully understand why and I must agree that I have a serious hate going for the synopsis.    After thinking about it, the hate writers have for the synopsis does make sense. In a synopsis a writer is condensing their whole book into a 1, 2, or 8 page summary, depending on what the situation requires. How in the world is that supposed to happen? I spend almost 5 hours last Thursday trying to figure that out and when I was done, I had a terrible 2 page draft. I mean it really was embarrassing how bad it was. The next morning I was brushing my teeth trying to gear up to tackle the thing again and I admit that my eyes might have teared up at the notion. How could I be a good writer if I couldn't ...

   I am a writer and aspiring author, but I have only been on this journey for about 8 months. I discovered at a writing conference recently that 8 months is, in fact, a very short time to be pursuing this dream. Since highschool, I have thought that being an author would be a something I would enjoy, but my own self-defeating voice would always brush that aside as unrealistic. So I continued to ignore that tiny voice that said it would be fun as I went through highschool graduation, choosing a degree in college, and colledge graduation. After college I became a mother for the first time and yet again the voice was ignored. Then, I met my friend Angela. She was working on her first novel and wanted me to read what she had. As I would talk with her about her book, that tiny voice began to grow again. If an average person like Angela could write a book, why not an average person like me?    I love science fiction/fantasy and have always had vivid dreams...