By Christine Kohler
I’ve always written to holes I see in children’s literature. I got into writing children’s lit in the early 1980s by writing what I could not find to buy for my own children—Christian contemporary “social problem” fiction with multi-racial casts. I sold the Growing Up Christian series Read More
By Christine Kohler
Have you been eating and a pesky fly won’t leave you alone? All I can think of is how that fly used to be a maggot. Dialogue tags can be like that, distracting to the point where you just want to throw your meal away. I have also put books Read More
By Christine Kohler
This article originally appeared on the (ICL) Institute of Children’s website.
Is your main character a stargazer or navel-gazer? Does your protagonist observe the world around him using his five senses? Or does she mutter inwardly to herself, totally self-absorbed? If your character is Read More
By Christine Kohler
Think of a story as a train. It has a beginning, stops it needs to make, and a destination. And it has a timetable at which to reach each whistlestop and the final destination. You are the conductor who holds the stopwatch.
"Literature is… tied to time in a way the Read More
By Christine Kohler
Wow! What a wild year 2014 has been. Last December Merit Press (Adams Media/ F+W Media) released the e-book of NO SURRENDER SOLDIER. January 2014 launched the hardback. I want to take this time at Thanksgiving to recap all the wonderful things that have Read More
By Christine Kohler
I have lectured on voice, dialect, and using foreign language within English-language texts. In many cases it is difficult to separate the three, especially in a novel liike NO SURRENDER SOLDIER (Merit Press, 2014) which is set on a Pacific island and all the characters are POC (non-white). However, for the sake Read More
Since the publication of my YA novel NO SURRENDER SOLDIER (January 2014, Merit Press) people ask where I got the idea for this historical story set on Guam about the after-effects of war on families for generations. In honor of the 70th anniversary celebrating the U.S. marines' liberation of Guam during WWII from the Read More
by Kym Brunner
One of the questions most asked of writers is: Where do you get your ideas?
Besides just being lucky to have a deliciously fertile (read: weird) imagination, I often get ideas for new books by seeing something on TV or in the news that Read More
Suzanne Kamata, an American author and teacher in Japan invited me to a blog hop about the writing life. Suzanne has guest blogged before in this Read Like A Writer blog about food in Read More
