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The Red Pen: A Two-Step in Dialogue Tags
“How are you?” she breathed. “I think you know,” he thundered. “Really?” she drawled. “Really,” he growled. Feel like you need a cold shower after reading this (unintentionally) hot and melodramatic scene? That’s because of the poorly-used dialogue tags. Realistic dialogue is hard enough to write without having to worry about…
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DEADLINE EXTENDED: Little Women 150th anniversary anthology open for submissions!
“I want to do something splendid . . . I think I shall write books . . . .” -Jo March, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, 1868 For generations, children around the world have come of age with Louisa May Alcott’s March girls. Their escapades and trials punctuated our own childhoods—maybe we weren’t victims of…
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The Red Pen: Sentence Solutions
The ability to craft beautiful sentences is a rare gift. The ability to wreak grammatical havoc on all things syntactic is, alas, far more common. Here are three common mishaps and a pocketful of solutions to your most common syntax sins. Offender #1: The Run-On When you connect independent clauses without punctuation or conjunctions, you’ve…
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Pitch Perfect in 3 Steps
“Are you crying?” Tom Hanks asks in A League of Their Own. “There’s no crying in baseball!” Maybe not in baseball…but certainly, many an author has shed tears over a pitch. So how do you turn your pitch into a home run? Step 1: Know Your Genre To say that your book is sci-fi is…
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Ernest Hemingway is Your Spirit Animal (or Probably Should Be)
“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” – Ernest Hemingway I can get behind that. “Papa” Hemingway’s novels are masterpieces of verbal economy—perennial favorites on high school reading lists because of their brevity. You read Hemingway, and you just know he…
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Author Interview: Isabella Murphy
Isabella Murphy’s debut children’s picture book, From Dark to Light, is coming on October 10th. In preparation for her book’s release, we would like to introduce you to Isabella. When did you first start writing? I first started enjoying to write in fourth grade when my teacher had us do creative writing and I wrote “The Dream”.…
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The Manuscript Diet
Looking to whittle down your word count? Here are three simple ways to cut the fat. Eliminate passive voice Remember this from elementary school? Passive voice is the difference between “The boy kicked the ball” and “The ball was kicked by the boy.” In the former, the subject (boy) is doing the action—in this case,…
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Pre-Launch Checklist for Indie Authors
You’ve put in the long hours to craft a book that you are proud of, and it’s almost ready to hit the shelves. So…now what? How do you let people know about it and get them as excited as you are for the release? We’ve created a checklist of tasks you can complete before your book…
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Meet Author and Illustrator Joy Heyer
Pink Umbrella Books is excited to announce that we are working with Virginia author and illustrator Joy Heyer on her children’s picture book Duck, Duck, Moose, which we plan to release in early 2018. We absolutely love Joy’s fun, creative story and whimsical illustrations, and we are excited to share them with you! In the meantime, enjoy getting…
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From Dark to Light Blog Tour
Pink Umbrella Books is excited to announce the “From Dark to Light” blog tour, which will run October 10-20, 2017. Interested bloggers should email us at info@pinkumbrellabooks.com or post in the comments below. About the book: Pumpker, a little boy pumpkin, desires nothing more than to be adopted by a family to make them happy. Planted…
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