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Into the West
It’s officially gone. Middle-earth News dot com has sailed into the west. It’s a bit surreal to realize all of those interviews and all of the content doesn’t exist anymore. At one point in time, the Twitter account had over 100K followers. Now they’re all gone. When I started the website back in January 2011,…
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Should I Take the Plunge?
Tomorrow marks five months since I began querying my debut novel, Awakening. I had decided to try my hand at traditional publishing back in September of 2024, which meant the arduous business of querying literary agents. I meticulously kept track of each query I sent out using a lengthy Excel document that would make anyone’s…
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The Next Lesson
As this Saturday draws closer, I can’t help but get excited for the next creative writing class I’ll be teaching. While the first session covered basics like the different forms of creative writing, genres and subgenres, how to stay inspired, and character building, the second session will go into more detail about the actual writing…
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Next Gen Authors
I wasn’t sure what was in store for me when I volunteered to teach a three session Creative Writing class to a group of 12-18 years of age teenage girls. Were they showing up just to tick a check on a badge requirement? Did their parents have errands and needed a convenient babysitting service? Would…
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A Rough Start
The transition from 2024 into 2025 has not gone as smoothly as I’d hoped. Right before Christmas I contracted E. coli poisoning. I’m not kidding when I say it was the sickest I’ve ever been. It took a solid two weeks to recover during which I missed most of the festive family events. This hit…
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A New Proof
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… I had a proof of my very first ever draft of Awakening privately printed. At that point in time, it didn’t have a title but was simplify known as First Draft. (Riveting, I know.) The story was terrible. No, really. The world was less…
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Thankful
For the past three weeks I’ve worked non-stop on the biggest renovation project I’ve ever tackled. I upgraded our entry, hallway, dinning room, and kitchen. If you’re wondering why I took on all of it at once, know that in our house, all four of those areas run together. You can’t work on one without…
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A Subjective Business
Being rather new to the querying scene, I have become painfully aware that I have a lot to learn about the process. I always wondered why writers referred to querying as being “in the trenches.” Now, I get it. The term trench conjures up mental images of high muddy walls cluttered with debris. The debris…
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The Importance of Free Writing the First Draft
I don’t know if there’s an actual term out there for when writers sit down and write their first draft, but I’ve started referring to it as “free writing”. To explain how I came up with that term, I need to go back many years ago to when I wrote my very first novel. After…
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Finding Hope in the Midst of Tragedy
I’ve been grieving ever since news began to trickle down from the western North Carolina (WNC) mountains. I couldn’t even begin writing this post without coming to tears. Hurricane Helene has forever changed my home state. They are saying the catastrophic flooding and mudslides that brought tragedy to so many of my fellow statesfolk was…
Arwen McCain 