I had the pleasure of visiting Ms. Bradunas’s class at the Our Lady of Hope/St. Luke School in Baltimore, MD this past Tuesday. We talked about The Storm, the first book in the Dogs of the Drowned City series, the real-world inspiration for the story, and how I created a dog’s eye view of the…
This week, I thought I would take on the YA-is-super-dark-and-isn’t-this-a-sign-teens-and-YA-authors-today-are-evil/morbid/violent/etc. argument. This issue crops up again and again in the media, like here and here. It came up in my FastCompany interview. And yes, there is a lot of heavy stuff in YA literature today. But is this a sign of change, or are YA…
Happy Thursday! I am working away on the final revisions to No Easy Way Out, the sequel to No Safety in Numbers, and thus have few thoughts outside of That Line Could be Tighter and What Happened Here? But I have perused some random things on the interwebs while working and they felt weirdly relevant…
If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right. – Henry Ford I write this blog in response to a commenter on an interview I did for FastCompany. The commenter called the story of my switch from the law to writing a “rubbish story,” suggesting that I…
I have taken the last month or so off from blogging and tweeting and Facebooking in an effort to remain sane while I finished Book 2 of the No Safety in Numbers trilogy. I am so excited about Book 2! It’s called No Easy Way Out. I hope you like it. I am about to…
I’m knee deep in the revision process, so I thought I would blog about some of the tools I use in revision. Sure, there’s the usual marking up of written text, but not at the beginning. At the beginning, I really try to re-vision the project, and to do that, I break the story and…
On today’s blog, I want to talk about the passage of time. My husband is a high school English teacher and he is big into integrating technology into his classroom. It is astounding the things that schools can offer today—not only online research or sharing documents wirelessly over an intranet, but interactive textbooks and virtual…
I woke up at around five in the morning the other day (ugh) thinking about the importance of Bad First Drafts. (Anne Lamott’s famous term involved more swear words, appropriately enough) I had lunch with a friend last week who mentioned that she was stuck with her novel and had stopped writing it. As we…
When I see a picture like this, the pieces of a story inevitably pop into my head. Usually, those pieces look a lot like questions. Does the ant hanging from the side of the berry want to shove the ant in the front off the wagon? Maybe the two fought over driving privileges? What kind…
In an effort to actually blog at all, I’m changing the format of the blog to focus on, well, nothing. And by nothing, I mean me and my life and more general things like what I’m doing and looking forward to in the writing world. Yesterday was the release day for my friend Megan Mayhew…
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.