Deanna Hoak

Okay. So has declared International Embarrass Yourself as an Artist Day. We’re supposed to post the grottiest, oldest, worst piece of juvenilia we have.
Now, I suppose I could have typed in the one with the wise disappearing unicorn and the talking balloons, but lucky you, you get the philosophical angst of a sixteen-year-old Deanna.
JUNK [...]

So my seven-year-old daughter was telling me last night about this werewolf story she wants to write, that she thinks might become a bestseller and be turned into a movie. It involves lots of blood and body parts and scary chases and deadly potions and self-serving decisions and murder. I don’t know where she gets [...]

Gakked from Jed Hartman. This reads pretty accurately for me–certainly the “How to get along with me” part (though I don’t think I’m as nervous as that has me sound). :-) I also think I’m better than most about giving my children independence, though I do worry about them terribly.
Oh, and the cartoon doesn’t work [...]

Miss Snark (the anonymous literary agent everyone should be reading if they don’t already) has an excellent post today on how agents do indeed send writers to editors or “book doctors” on occasion. You should check it out.
One of the top agents in the genre contacted me last week with a fun new project to [...]

Had a lovely lunch with Safewrite today, who was visiting from NYC. The warm weather was quite a change for her, I’m sure. :-)
I ate way too much Indian food–I can never get enough of the stuff, and they had chicken vindaloo on the buffet today. Yummmmmm…..:-) I ended up skipping dinner entirely because [...]

I haven’t talked about my own writing in a while. :-) The process of putting my own words on paper has very honestly made me a better copyeditor, though, and it’s something I enjoy.
Here are my current first lines:
“Mutual Feelings”: Tare trembled as John tangled his fingers in her hair and brushed his [...]

I had Evan in my lap today when I pulled up my blog, and he pointed excitedly at my picture and said, “That’s my pretty mommy! My pretty mommy who loves me!”
I melted. :-)

I think I’ve asked you this before, but do you like to see an author provide their own style sheet with lists of odd words/usages/explanations?
This sounds as though it would be really helpful, but on the few (two) occasions where I’ve had an author provide a style sheet, it actually wasn’t helpful to me at [...]

I’m still pulling questions from the comment threads, and probably will be for a while. :-)
asked: Is most fiction still edited in hard copy? All the university presses I do work for have switched to electronic files, copyedited onscreen. I love this: I can work much faster, and it’s trivially easy to go back [...]

I’d love to see authors post an interesting portion from the style sheet of their latest book, as I did earlier this week for Josh Conviser’s Echelon. This could fall flat, because I know that some publishers don’t provide a copy of the style sheet for the author. :-) But! In case you do have [...]