Tomeworks Blog
Fun with the Chicago Manual of Style
One of the fun things we like to do here at Tomeworks is go through the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) Q&A to determine how their updates impact our editing world. Here are some of our favorites from late 2023. We hope these help you get your writing right the first time around.
10 Houston Authors We Love
Whether you know it as Space City, Clutch City, or Screwston, there’s a lot overlooked about the largest city in Texas. From the 215 languages spoken in the metro area to its storied history as a meeting place of cultures, Houston is a vibrant and diverse city well known for food, culture, and big business. From the towering Phillip Johnson skyscrapers of downtown through lush green Oak-lined neighborhoods to strip centers of concrete stretching for miles and sprawling exurbs reaching across the Katy Prairie, Houston has a plethora of real and imagined worlds teeming within. Here are ten of our favorite writers who have called H-Town home, whether Houston-born, Houston-bound, or just passing through.
It Takes a Village to Write a Book
Today we live in a world of Zoom calls and binge-watched television shows, of isolation in the big city and blocking people on social media. But we are no closer as writers to being an island than our forebears ever were. We need each other as a community, as partners in creative construction, and as reviewers and feedback-givers maybe now more than ever.
Zombie Writing and How to Kill It
Today we’re going to discuss something much more horrible, much more frightening, something that will rise up from a dirty plot in the ground, grab your pacing by the legs, and drag it down, down, down until it too is a shambling mess, ambling mindlessly from one concept in your story to the next.
Zombie writing.
Roasting Writing Advice
Every time someone offers a piece for critique, there are a few items that seem to always make an appearance, regardless of whether or not they’re actually useful to the writer. Feedback needs to be applicable and it needs to be actionable, and sometimes, repeating a common slogan of writing like it’s immutable law isn’t either of those things. So today, we’re venting, we’re roasting, we’re chewing, and most importantly, we’re having fun by taking the piss out of pieces of common writing advice.
What is “incluing”, and why should you be doing it?
Introducing readers to a new world can be an interesting challenge. How do you explain to your readers the workings or a world that may be very different from our own? How do you explain what motivates a character if you can’t tell the audience directly?
How long should your novel be?
You’re ready to write a novel, but now that you’re staring at a blank page, you face a new question: how long is a novel, anyway? You’ve read books, so you know what a normal book length is, but how do you make sure that what you’re writing is an acceptable (publishable) length?
The answer is to use word count.