the site of middle grade author Jackie Yeager
Manuscript Monday is a series of blog posts which chronicle the life of my manuscript. It follows the journey I take to turn my week old baby story idea into a fully grown, polished novel. Take the journey with me. 🙂 Writers tend to have a preferred way of drafting a new manuscript. They either… Continue reading Manuscript Monday #24
Manuscript Monday is a series of blog posts which chronicle the life of my manuscript. It follows the journey I take to turn my week old baby story idea into a fully grown, polished novel. Take the journey with me. 🙂 My 7 week- old manuscript: Happy Monday! Today, as much of our country closes down and… Continue reading Manuscript Monday # 7
Yesterday was the last day of school for my kids. Yippee! Hooray! Time to do a happy dance. My kids skipped through the door and tossed their backpacks. They did the happy dance. Okay maybe they didn’t skip, and maybe they didn’t do the happy dance either, but they did toss their backpacks. They are… Continue reading Plot vs. Story
Obstacles are no fun. They get in the way. They block the road or the path or your dreams. Obstacles can be small like the time when little Patrick couldn’t finish building his tower because he used up all his wooden blocks. Or the time Jenna couldn’t color the grass green on her picture because… Continue reading Throw Obstacles in the Path
We all want to create interesting characters for our stories, right? I sure do! One of the best ways I’ve found to do that is to give your character a Basic Belief. A Basic Belief is something your character believes to be true. Here are 2 examples of characters and their Basic Beliefs: • Tori… Continue reading Basic Beliefs
You just might be. If you can’t get enough of your favorite books… you know, if your nose is stuck in a book kind of a lot, then yup—you’re  a Bouque. So what’s a Bouque? The French word, Bouquiner means to read—or loosely translated, to have one’s nose stuck in a book. So that’s what I… Continue reading Are You a Bouque?
Whether you’re writing a story for children or adults, there are universal writing principles that will make your story stronger. These tips, originally created for beginning writers of middle grade fiction, can be applied to writers of any level, who write fiction for any audience. Find Your Writing Voice What exactly is voice? Writing voice is… Continue reading Scribble Tips
I’m back in the query trenches. It’s official and I thought it would be fun to bring you guys along for the ride! If you’re new here, you may not realize that I was agented before. I blogged about how I got my first agent here. The day I signed with her (after eight years… Continue reading Jumping Back into the Query Trenches
I don’t know if it’s like this for any of you, but when I’m working on a new manuscript, I can’t write anything else. Not a short story, not a blog post, hardly even an email. My mind is so full of new book stuff that there’s just no room to add more. That’s why… Continue reading Great Writing Doesn’t Happen Fast
No book is perfect. It’s more common than you think to find a typo or a misspelled word, those proverbial book Easter eggs, on a page or two. Unfortunately, things like that get missed in books before they go to production all the time, even when they’re edited by the best editing team on the… Continue reading Chasing Book Perfection—or Book Perfect-ish
swirl and spark 