J. Leigh Bralick

I'm a writer, a dreamer, and a fighter. I only kill people in stories.

Most commented posts

  1. Failing Gracefully as a Writer — 9 comments
  2. How to make a YA book cover in 4 easy steps! — 7 comments
  3. Preparing to Publish: Editing — 6 comments
  4. Introducing the other sister…muse… — 5 comments
  5. Paying Attention — 3 comments

Author's posts

Why We Waste Time

This is a topic that’s been on my mind a lot lately while I’ve, well, been wasting time.  I feel like I haven’t done any significant writing for almost a year. (Heck, I haven’t even been blogging!)  Some of that was unavoidable — personal issues to deal with, classes and a full time job that …

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Empathy – The Key to Writing Deep Emotion

A reader recently sent me this question, after reading The Madness Project: I find that it’s difficult to convey strong emotion or culminate events without being drippy…How were you able to stay deep and involved without going overly sentimental? The question took me a bit by surprise.  I’d never really thought about it before…although I can …

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Thanks to Our Participants!

We just want to say thank you to all the people who participated in our first SisterMuses giveaway!  We think you guys are more awesome than Chuck Norris on a plane…or two.   And epic congratulations to Andrew H. who won the three autographed paperbacks. Stay tuned — we will be having more giveaways of …

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5 Ways to Travel for Inspiration

If you’re like me, you love to travel…but probably don’t get to as often as you’d like.  Maybe it’s the time, maybe it’s the money…or maybe it’s both. There’s that day job that you actually have to go to (you know, to pay the bills).  Or there are the kids or the pets (or both) …

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Help us help a friend!

All right, folks. We need your help. Some of you may already know that David Farland has been a huge inspiration and wonderful teacher for both S.K. and me.  Well, last month, his son Ben was in a terrible accident which will likely run his family into over a million dollars in medical bills (they don’t …

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Writerly Recipes — Lemon Ginger Tea

Well, it’s that time of year around here…for some reason the nasty bronchitis/cold/ick goes around in early spring down here, and I swear half the people I know are struggling through it right now.  Being sick is, generally speaking, a rather unpleasant sort of thing, and I try to avoid it as much as possible.  I’ve warded …

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J. Leigh’s Website Overhaul

I’m in the process of renovating my author website…Wordpress is making things so much easier for me!  *happy dance*  I didn’t really have time to keep the old site maintained, because I’m a terrible coder and it takes me hours to figure out how to do anything.  It should probably annoy me that I spent …

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Vivid vs. Violet Verbiage — The Vivid

Now that we’ve cleared up the meaning of purple prose, I can talk a little bit about what makes great prose so beautifully vivid. Please note that, for all I’m warning you to avoid the overly-ostentatious verbiage, I’m not recommending reducing your vocabulary to the grade-school level.  No, your writing should always bring some challenge …

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Vivid vs. Violet Verbiage — The Violet

As S.K. noted in her last blog post…it’s been a crazy end to the old year and an even crazier start to the new year for us around here.  Apologies for being MIA… At any rate, today I want to talk about something I’ve said I want to talk about many times in the past …

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Editing Focus 4: Syllabic Editing

Okay.  So.  Long overdue editing blog post: check. This is the last Editing Focus blog post we’ll have for our Fall Blog Fest…so…hope you enjoy it!  It’s my personal favorite, as far as annoying things like editing are concerned.  😉 Syllabic editing isn’t something you’ll hear talked about a whole lot.  I first heard about …

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