I've been catching up on some blog reading this week. Elizabeth Spann Craig has a great blog called Mystery Writing is Murder. I've been reading her posts about her self-publishing journey, but she's got lots of great stuff.

After reading my friend Laura Drake's guest post this week, I wrote a piece for my RWA chapter about encouraging words. It takes so little to brighten someone's day, and so often it comes back to you in one way or another. Laura said she's going to keep a copy of all the lovely comments people left her to read on the hard days. What a great idea!

Laura also wrote a blog post at Writers in the Storm called Adjusting to the Paradigm Shift. She looks at the trends of first sales as reported in the RWA magazine, Romance Writers Report, and considers how to proceed.

My Routines for Writers partner had a great post last week about making sure each of your scenes has a purpose. An excellent way to stay on track or to find out which scenes need to be edited or cut.

Agent Rachelle Gardner has a great blog post on how to market your book. The fun part about it is that it's made up of all the great posts that her clients have written on the topic. Check it out.

In grad school, I accidentally wrote a couple of Young Adult pieces. Since then, I've been reading blogs relating to YA books. Here is a post called Are You a YA Writer and You Don't Even Know It?

Writer Beware issued a warning about emails soliciting authors to send their work to a publisher who wants to work with them. Publishers don't solicit material in this way. Read the post and, as always, be wary of emails from people and companies you aren't familiar with.

[I just deleted a section because the link was to something that ended yesterday.]

That's all I've got for this week. Hope you find something interesting and/or useful. Tomorrow and Monday I'll talk about my City2Surf pre-race panic and post-race steak and eggs celebration. Have an awesome weekend!