There have been several excellent posts here this month about costumes and dressing our characters, so I thought I would take a bit of a divergent path with my post today.  Have you ever stopped to think that life is so much like the bag of Halloween candy that we used to get when we went out trick-or-treating? The bag would fill up with all kinds of unknown things as we dashed through the darkness going from house to house shouting, "Trick or treat." The air was filled with electric excitement as we anticipated enjoying all the goodies that were filling our bags. Then sometimes as we walked along the sidewalk, we'd reach into the bag and pluck something out, not really knowing what we were going to get. Maybe it would be something really scrumptious, like our favorite candy bar. Or maybe it would be just a simple piece of peppermint wrapped in plastic. Or the dreaded apple. Life is like that. Often we reach into each day and we don't know what we'r...

There are a lot of well-known awards for writing, like the Agatha or The Pulitzer Prize. Any writer would love to win those awards, but there are quite a few that are less well-known, but also prestigious. Later this month, The Blood-Red Pencil will have a week about writing awards. Since I don’t usually post during that week, I thought I’d tell you about a friend and great writer, Sylvia Dickey Smith , and the award she won. Or to be more accurate, I’ll let her tell you. Sylvia, in 2011, your book, A War of Her Own , won the Texas Press Women Award, then you went on to Nationals. What was that like? Helen, so glad you asked! And to clarify—I not only went on to nationals but I placed 2nd there—to a Fulbright Scholar and head of the Fulbright Scholar program at her university, and who wrote her book while on a Fulbright-Scholarship-funded sabbatical—that made second place a little sweeter. These were my first state and national awards so I wear them proudly! When I received word ...

Oops! My first edit of the year. Happy N ew Y ear! Some of you are probably still on holiday, but the Blood-Red Pencil editors have been busy planning the 2012 schedule. We'll continue with our individual posts the first part of the month, like Kathryn Craft's popular Busted! series. Then we'll have special guests the third week, and the last week of each month add a different new theme. This year, we'll post those topics in advance right here on the blog. If you have a contribution you'd like to make around our topic-of-the-month, please shoot us an email . Our theme for January is Conferences with Awards , and specifically we'll address how an author would use an award as a promotion tool for their book. There are more prizes and medals than you can imagine for all genres, and many are available to individuals as well as self-published authors. This is an area of publishing that is changing and expanding as quickly as everything else in the industry. ...