Smyth Editorial Services

An interesting bit of history for the word-obsessed. It's particularly fascinating to check which words were added in your birth year!

Time Traveler by Merriam-Webster: Words from 2016 See which words were first recorded in 2016. Or search for other words by the year when they were first used.

I love collecting writing prompts to help jog ideas for short stories. Here's one you may find useful... or at the very least, entertaining!

My suggestion ended up being: "After the polar ice is destroyed by World War III, a demoralized soldier must survive by restarting genetically engineered cats." What's yours?

Discover the Plot of Your Post-Apocalyptic Novel With Our Handy Chart Who will survive, and what will be left of them? We've got an easy way to figure it out

There are many reasons why writing is tricky; this is one of them!

While many people don't see sharing a book's PDF to be harmful, Maggie Stiefvater's article takes a good look at the damage digital piracy can do to an author's work.

"Then they told me that they were cutting the print run of 'The Raven King' to less than half of the print run for 'Blue Lily, Lily Blue.' No hard feelings, understand, they told me, it’s just that the sales for 'Blue Lily' didn’t justify printing any more copies. The series was in decline, they were so proud of me, it had 19 starred reviews from pro journals and was the most starred YA series ever written, but that just didn’t equal sales. They still loved me."

Contents of Maggie Stiefvater's Brain I’ve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy. I didn’t think I had much to add to the piracy commentary I made yesterday, but after seeing some of the replies to it, I decided it’s time for this story. Here are a few things we should get clear before I go on: 1) This is a U.S. centered discuss...

The newest Darla Decker book is available for pre-order! I'm the editor for the two most recent titles in the series and I've tremendously enjoyed working on them. This is a wonderful middle grade series with plenty of charm and sass.

Amazon: http://bit.ly/EP4DDBTCama
Barnes and Noble: http://bit.ly/EP4DDBTCbnEB
iBooks: http://bit.ly/EP4DDBTCib
Kobo: http://bit.ly/EP4DDBTCko
Smashwords: http://bit.ly/EP4DDBTCsw

Darla Decker Breaks the Case (Darla Decker Diaries Book 5) Three best friends, thirty-two cats, one mind-blowing mystery....It's the summer before high school, and secrets are turning Darla Decker's life upside down. With her parents' increasing distance and her brother's eagerness to escape, life is tense at home.Even Darla, Reggie, and Nate's first tra...

For the generation of kids who grew up watching Reading Rainbow, LeVar Burton's new podcast is a wonderful thing!

LeVar Burton Reads: The Best Short Stories, Performed Just for You In each episode, host LeVar Burton (Reading Rainbow, Star Trek, Roots) hand-picks a different piece of short fiction, and reads it to you.

Authors often go to fascinating lengths for the sake of research... and sometimes just to sate some curiosity.

How to Do Karate in a Victorian Dress When Mary Robinette Kowal and I were on tour together, she asked me to record something for a charity fundraiser: a video of me performing a karate kata in the Victorian dress I wore for our tour e…

Writers are always on the lookout for new settings and characters, which may make us seem a bit weird to outsiders.

The Weird Life of a Writer: When Does Stalking Cross the Line? by Jennifer Levine | Portland Book Review If you’ve ever had a friend who’s a writer odds are, during introductions, you’ve felt compelled to explain away one of the obvious quirks by adding, “he’s a writer.” This inevitably results in a nod of acknowledgement. As if writers fall into a moderately handicapped group. Of course there is a lim...

An article with some good advice for authors and other creative types!

The Importance of Taking a Break by Kira A. McFadden | Portland Book Review Writers write – this mantra is heard in every corner of the writing industry, and it’s true. The very nature – the core, if you will – of being a writer is that we write. To become successful, we must write often, typically resulting in writing becoming a full-time job. Not every writer has the luxu...

As many of you are tackling the annual NANOWRIMO challenge, here's a wonderful little article about the struggle to make time for writing with the added complication of children thrown in the mix.

Writing While Raising Small Children by Becky Banks | Portland Book Review I’m a stay-at-home mom and writer. I spend most days chasing a 2.5-year-old, trying to convince him that pants are a good thing. I do this while writing romance novels professionally. I wasn’t always this glamorous.

Scorched Souls, the third and final book in the chosen series, is now available for purchase! Right now there's a sale on the bundle of all three eBooks through the link below.

This is a wonderful YA fantasy series with a Native American female protagonist, and I can honestly say that it was a joy to work on this series.

A Chosen Novel (3 Book Series) When someone murders medicine men in my sleepy Arizona town, I can’t help but worry my crazy grandfather is involved. He’s a medicine man and more than a just a little eccentric. He likes to tell me stories about the Great Wind Spirit and Coyote, but none of it makes any sense. I thought I knew the…