Cuteness Alert!

Today The Pie welcomes Susan Dennard, author of the 2012 debut Something Strange and Deadly. This week, the WOA girls have promoted this fantastic debut and giving you a chance to read it before you can buy it. Read on to learn more about Susan’s revision process. My revising process is...well, the word "intense" comes to mind. As I've talked about before, I'm not a particularly good writer. I ramble, backtrack, infodump, and pretty much do everything one shouldn't do to tell a good story. But you know what? I'm a darn good re -writer and an even better reviser . The key to my process is having a plan and staying organized. I never dive into revisions without a clear idea of what I need to do next--of what my story needs next in order to reach that goal of book-awesomeness. ;) You'll notice as I go through the steps of my revising process that I link to various pages. These are the lessons from my " Sooz's Guide to Revisions &quo

Happy Bir-rrrraaaiiinnnss!

By Alicia Gregoire - February 04, 2010

Zombie Thursdays is a weekly feature with guest blogger, Miranda. You can read more about her here . Each week as I plan out what I’m going to write about for Zombie Thursday, my mind is usually stuck on one main idea or theme. I have this outline in my head, then I start writing it in my head. I also decide what kind of pictures I need to find or what kind of photos I need to take. All of this mashes around inside of my brain and eventually I sit down and write, write, write. A couple of weeks ago I had a pretty solid idea on a cool blog to write, but I had this incredibly random zombie dream and at the last minute decided to write about that instead. The same idea that I bumped from that week was supposed to make an appearance today. I’m sure you can guess where this is going... Yes, I am bumping it again. When it finally does get published on Zombie Thursdays, I’m hoping you all will think it is a fun one! I think it is going to be good. But once again, it seems as if the fa

American Sign Language

By Miranda - August 08, 2011

Hello, lovely Pie readers! Surprise! You get another week with me, Miranda! Alicia is off vacationing in the "Real World House," so I volunteered to take up the duties over here on the blog. Hope you all don't mind. So without further ado-- Another small fun fact about me is that, while in college, I actually minored in American Sign Language. There was no real reason for this. I had already met the language requirement for my school by taking seven years of French from ages 9 to 16. So, I didn't even need to take ASL. I just really wanted to learn a new language. After the first semester, I loved it and wanted to learn more, so I continued and was able to make it my minor. Some of you may be familiar with ASL, maybe you know a person in the deaf community. But it's also likely that many of you may have no experience with the language and culture beyond learning how to finger spell many years ago in grade school. I'd like to give you some interesting fac