Books & Stories – Page 15 – Monica Valentinelli

March 30, 2010Blog

Emotional Connection and Writing

Sad Puppy Last weekend at my writer’s group, we were discussing how necessary it is to develop an emotional connection with the reader through your work. In fact, a strong emotional connection between the reader and the character can translate to a best-selling book that many of us might not think is all that “good.” It can also translate to the proverbial nerd rage when someone doesn’t like the same book, character, movie, game or comic that someone else love with all their heart.

Those common emotional experiences can range from love to hate and everything in between.

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March 17, 2010Blog

Is Blogging and Social Media Affecting Your Ability to Write What You Want?

If you’ve been following my blog, you may have seen my earlier post about Write First, Sell Later where I express how I feel it’s important to separate your promotional time from your writing time.

One of the things that I’ve found is that a timer isn’t “enough” to discipline me to get off of social media or blogging channels to write, write, write. Why? Well, blogging requires one mindset for me; social media requires another. In many ways, blogging requires a “voice” which may vary depending upon the blog.

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November 12, 2009Blog

Why Your D&D Game Doesn’t Make a Great Novel

Have you heard the line, “Your D&D game won’t make a great novel?” If you’ve heard me speak on panels before, or if you’ve read several submission guidelines from agents or publishers, you might have. I’d like to tackle why. First, let’s get all the bad mojo out there on the table by saying something […]

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October 21, 2009Blog

Songs for the Cyclical Nature of Publishing

I’ve been really busy working on revisions for ARGENTUM and a few gaming-related things that have popped up. In between thinking about all the cool projects I’ve been working on and lamenting my novel revisions, I heard a song in my head. Literally. That song was “Bang Your Head” by Quiet Riot. I thought to […]

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August 20, 2009Blog

Writing Reviews Can Help You, Too!

Writing a review of someone else’s work is probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to learn how to do. Teleporting out of my creative mindset to critique a book or a movie was pretty challenging, because it forced me to deconstruct how someone else put together a particular body of work. So […]

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