DeAnna Knippling

I used to reread everything I loved.  I think I made it through The Hobbit like twenty-plus times.  It was to the point where the librarians at the town library took me aside once and said, “Maybe you should try something new.”  But no; I was going to read the same things over and over again, […]

So, hopefully by the time you read this, I’ll have written two novels in six weeks.  This isn’t a joke; I had two 60K ghostwriting projects back to back, and one of them went late–I ended up having to write them both at the same time. Update:  Made it 😉 A lot of stuff fell

People are always trying to pressure me into changing my opinion.  I get that.  I seem like a soft target:  I let people present their arguments to me, and I actually listen.  Sometimes I even change my mind. In addition, I have been trained in the kind of female empathy that says, “I have no

Universal Sales Link | Goodreads The fairies are coming…the fairies are coming… To kill us all. It’s 1989. A small Midwestern college town with a history of strange sightings and hauntings. A summer intern program in the biology department that actually pays. And coworkers who don’t warn you about vivisection day… Della Rae planned to keep

IMO, one of the things that made Hemingway so interesting as a writer was that he messed with readers’ minds in a different way than a lot of other writers had been doing up to that point. He focused on forcing people to read between the lines–how to make the readers do the heavy lifting/imaginative

I think you have to age into some kinds of poetry. The crickets are singing on a cool July night, and just the sound of them tells me how the year is going, and how bittersweet the passage of time is becoming. Love is great and identity is important–but it’s the crickets that are poetry

Here are the top tropes from the Amazon Kindle Mystery, Thriller & Suspense–>Suspense–>Horror list as of July 27, 2017.  As I was investigating the list, I found something surprising… Detective investigates horror – The River Is Dark by Joe Hart Try to find out why loved one did horrible thing – The Silent Corner by

I started journaling on a blank half-page.  The first few lines were the usual rubbish.  Then:  “How much journaling is enough?” popped up, and I had to wonder.  I normally do nothing, or three pages. During weeks where I have a lot of freelancing to do, it’s generally nothing. But in that half page, I

Here’s my current schedule: Do “human stuff” like get dressed and eat breakfast. Write Hustle Study Lunch Freelancing Family A lot of what I’m seeing is that I’m not spending my “hustle” time wisely; I get into a habit of doing things that are pleasant to do, but not especially effective in marketing and promotions–like

A question that I simply had to answer on FB…everyone else was addressing the fact that it’s fine that stories without elements of the supernatural are considered horror, but not talking about underlying reasons why.  Genre is often a marketing category–not a logical one.  I realized that I’ve actually read broadly enough across the history of