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Cheryl Reif

Cheryl lives and writes with her inspirational family, two energetic dogs, and a small mammal menagerie, all of which are fairly tame. She writes about cool science stuff for children and adults, daydreams about stories and characters 87% of the time, and tries not to plot novels while driving.

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Thursday’s Thing to Love About Being a Writer: the Power of Words

Today’s thing to love is the magic of words combined. Stitched together, words can create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts—poetry, prose, art in written form. For your writerly enjoyment, here’s Taylor’ Mali’s poetic satire of the use of speech devices such as “like,” “okay,” and “ya know”:

Like, ya …

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Off to the Pikes Peak Writers Conference!

As I mentioned earlier this week, I’m enjoying a weekend of inspiration and learning at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference, in Colorado Springs, CO. I’ll be back next week, and plan to kick off the new Friday series—profiles of publishers accepting unagented manuscripts—with information about Belle Books/Bell Bridge Books.

If you have any specific …

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NaNoWriMo: What I Learned

Nano 2009

This post was originally published November 29, 2009–at the end of the 2009 NaNoWriMo. Debating whether to join NaNoWriMo this year? Read on!

I suffered a crisis of confidence during this last week of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, for the uninitiated). One week left to write–including Thanksgiving day–and I still had 18,000 words to …

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Tightening Your (Manuscript’s) Belt: a Checklist for Eliminating Unnecessary Prose

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This post–my Tuesday Ten stand-in–was originally published January 20, 2011. Hope you enjoy!

Writers: we like to write. Some of us (like me!) like to write lots and lots and lots of pretty words…and then have to cut half of them during the rewrite/polish process.

I’ve been doing a LOT of rewriting—and cutting and tightening—these …

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Welcome!

Peek-a-boo!

…to my new WordPress blog and writing website! Please forgive (and let me know about!) any broken links and other technical snafus. This is definitely a work-in-progress

And apologies to those who tried to read my last post only to find it missing! One bug fixed, 197 or so to go!

:~) Cheryl

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