Writing outside your background
Coming from a multicultural background myself, I decided to write about this topic (and about writing outside your group). I’m essentially Latina, but in Brazil, for example, we rarely use this termination. We are all brazilians, but our culture has a pride on saying where your ancestors come from or who they were. […]
Writing Brazilian Fiction
A couple of weeks ago, my friend/CP/Brazilian fellow YA writer Debbie spurred on an interesting conversation in twitter about Brazilian representation in fiction and how often we see it misrepresented in our own niche — YA and MG. She put it up on storify in some eloquent twitter words, but I thought I might expand […]
Introducing: Pitch América
I’m SUPER MEGA EXCITED to announce I’m going to be hosting a pitch contest come August that will focus on Latinx voices!!! You can visit the site HERE. I love that the industry is trying to expand their welcoming to diverse voices and how important it is to see yourself represented on books. Not only […]
The Guide to starting a Writing Bullet Journal
You may have heard of Bullet Journals — notebooks that are transformed into daily planners for organizing life in a much easier method. In a way, bullet journals are harder to manage than daily planners, but somewhat also cheaper. Daily Planners are full of color, tags, stickers and what-not, all designed to be that way […]
Just give me Unlikable Female Characters
Confession time: one of the first comments I got from several beta readers on my MS was how unlikable my characters were. Not only in one MS, but in 3 different ones. For a while, I was worried I was doing something wrong, until it hit me that not ALL the characters have to be […]
English as my Writing Language
I never thought I’d write a post like this. Following Susan Dennard’s newsletter from the last year, one of the goals she proposed was being kinder to yourself. Stop bullying yourself. It’s the small things we do everyday — drop something and say ‘God how are you so stupid’ or not being able to accomplish […]
Staying motivated in Nanowrimo
It’s day 10 of Nanowrimo, which means at least 33,33% of your goal is already done!! Congratulations if you’re there, and if you’re not, that’s okay too — it’s all about trying to catch up and do your best. After the first week hits, our motivations tend to waver a little if not go downhill […]
To Prompt or not to Prompt
This whole blog posted was prompted (a-hem) by a conversation I had on twitter with a friend a few days ago. She had recently finished her first MS, and was lost and wandering in the sea of first-time writers with a ready MS and no idea where to go next. Some of us have often […]
1st Person vs 3rd Person: The Eternal Debate
It’s me checking on writing again. Lately I’ve read a couple of novels (by a couple I mean: I binge-read about ten YA books in two weeks) and I noticed they all had something in common: they all involved 1st person POV. Don’t get me wrong – I like 1st person POV, when it’s well […]
Don’t Compare your Book to Other People’s
For a writer, it’s easy to come across something similar to an idea we’ve had before. It’s always a shock, and if you’re like me, your immediate reaction might be: “OH MY GOD, NO. I CAN NEVER WRITE THIS AGAIN’. Because truth be told, not only there might be implications of plagiarism, but there are […]