This summer, I’ve been reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. It’s taken me longer than I’d like to admit to finish it, but I finally reached the end! It’s an awesome book full of weird and wonderful characters, containing perhaps the greatest funeral luncheon scene ever written and the best insult this side of Shakespeare:…
My eight month old son loves those little wind-up toys you get for like a buck in the bins at the front of the toy store. (I know, not baby safe, TERRIBLE PARENT, but I only let him use them when I’m supervising, etc., etc., moving on…) So, we’re playing with one yesterday: this little…
I have entered upon that decent into darkness that is revising a first draft. The draft in question: Book Three of No Safety in Numbers. (New Idea has been put on hold until this process is complete.) I haven’t read this draft in two months, which means that it feels like someone else’s book. Which…
I’m going to state the obvious: writing a convincing character is hard. I mean, the entire project sounds ludicrous. How do you get a bunch of words on the page to coalesce in the mind of a reader as a complicated, coherent, full-bodied person with whom they want to go on a journey of several…
Sorry about missing last week blog-wise. My mom was in town and we were doing fun stuff together. I like my mom. She is good. I’m really excited about this Coverflip project Maureen Johnson got started the other day. (If you follow me on Twitter, I’ve been posting a lot of cover-related stuff there.) The…
I’m so excited about the prospect of a Graceling movie! Not only is Kristin a friend, but I am a huge fan of Graceling, Fire, and Bitterblue. As a lover of the books, I wonder how the movies will change the stories, how well the production team’s imagining of the world will align with my…
One of the best gifts a person can give you as a writer is constructive, thoughtful feedback on your work. None of my books would be what they are without the insightful comments of a few trusted readers and editors, and my writing would not be what it is today without having grappled with the…
I thought I’d take a blog post to talk about ideas and where they come from. I’m reading On Writing by Stephen King and the passage about how he came up with the idea for Carrie really resonated. King talks about how in college, he had worked as a High School janitor and was fascinated…
This week, the Los Angeles Review of Books published an essay on the dearth of role models in modern YA literature showing a healthy path from boyhood to manhood. The author points to 19th century literature, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as providing the kind of role models for this path that we currently lack….
Today is the start of National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, it is exactly what it sounds like: A group of writers, both professionals and amateurs, who come together to support one another in writing a novel in a month, and that month is this month—November….
Dayna Lorentz is the author of the DOGS OF THE DROWNED CITY series (Scholastic) and NO SAFETY IN NUMBERS (Dial).
I write because I have to; I write because I love to; I eat cupcakes because they’re there.