Kate Spofford, author

Category: Writing

  • in other news…

    In self-publishing news… My very first novel, Bethany Caleb, is now available!  So is The Art Kids!  It’s ridiculously easy to publish a book on Kindle.  Too easy.  Have I made a mistake?  Are there typos?  Probably…  It’s a scary thing to send your creations out there.  While in the privacy of my own home…

  • I FOUND IT!

    Of course I did.  After stressing about having to reconstruct the whole novel… I thought I had already tried getting my Bethany Caleb off my old floppies last year, and all I had was an incomplete draft (draft 9).  But lo and behold, when I inserted the floppy this time, it told me the disk…

  • rewriting what has already been written

    After losing a good portion of the final draft of Bethany Caleb (I’ve got 27 pages of roughly 100), I’ve been attempting to reconstruct it… and it’s almost harder than writing it the first time.  I found a handwritten copy of Bethany’s school schedule, so I’ve been trying to piece together her one day at…

  • my novel is lost… most of it, anyway.

    After searching through several flash drives, I finally found several drafts of my first novel, Bethany Caleb, which I am considering self-publishing in advance of Hitchhikers.  More as a test of the whole self-publishing system, but also because I still love that story and found an awesome image to make a cover with! However, none…

  • V.C. Andrews: The Formula!

    So there is, literally, a V.C. Andrews formula.  We all know V.C. Andrews is dead, right?  The family estate hired a ghostwriter to continue her legacy (of torrid novels about incest) and I’m pretty sure he (Andrew Neiderman) works off a formula.  Or did.  I stopped reading V.C. Andrews novels after the Hudson series… or,…

  • Hitchhikers cover reveal!

    It has taken some time – had to get permissions for the artwork, and tweak the font so that it’s readable as a teeny-tiny thumbnail – but finally I have a cover for Hitchhikers!!!   I like a lot, although I did prefer my initial design which used a different model and more of a…

  • the mid-point reversal

    As I was working on Dreamwalkers Friday night, I realized that I am nearly at the point of the mid-point reversal. I didn’t know what a mid-point reversal was until I read Story Engineering by Larry Brooks.  At that point I looked at Hitchhikers and was pleased to find that I had instinctively included this…

  • cover design and all its complications

    This self-publishing idea has really taken root in my brain and will not let go.  Perhaps it is because I feel like I have exhausted all possibilities in my quest to find an agent/publisher, or perhaps because I am seeing more and more self-published authors making it, or perhaps because I am tired of seeing…

  • writing is hard.

    There are so many distractions… so many things to see on the interwebs… I am watching Janina type away and maybe she’s thinks I’m writing too, but I’m not working on my novel like I should be… Today I read this article about authors who self-publish ebooks and are actually able to make a living…

  • the Possession Story formula

    This week I am examining the common formula for a story about demon possession, using the following 5 movies:     Start with a young woman, just hitting puberty. The Exorcist: Regan is a 12-year-old girl The Exorcism of Emily Rose: Emily is college-aged young woman The Last Exorcism: Nell is a teenage girl The Possession:…