Traditionally published author, developmental editor, and story development consultant in the publishing, TV, and film industries.
Ongoing contributor to leading writing industry trade magazines, including: Writer's Digest Magazine, The Writer Magazine, Writing Magazine (UK), and Script Magazine.
The Producers Guild has one of the leading screenwriting and producing fellowship programs in the entertainment industry. I teach all of the story development workshops for their "Power of Diversity Producers Fellowship" participants. Only working entertainment industry professionals can join the program. I teach feature film, television, and documentary story development.
I teach basic story development and story structure to screenwriters.
I teach basic story development and story structure to novelists and creative nonfiction authors.
Regular instructor through Stanford University's School of Continuing Education. I teach premise development and story structure classes and guest lecture on story development for other Stanford writing program instructors.
Worked with two of the largest subsidy publishing companies as an editorial consultant and developmental editor. Worked with fiction, nonfiction, and creative nonfiction authors to improve their book's structure, story, narrative design, and assure book elements conformed to publishing industry best practices. Consulted with thousands of authors across all major genres.
Founded Storygeeks, a professional services company offering story consulting, editing, and story development services to the entertainment (film/TV), publishing, and subsidy publishing industries.
Narrative pace can make or break the reading experience, but few people describe what real pace is or how you can achieve it. Most just discuss writing, style, and sentence structure, but pacing in any story is so much more than that. This e-book gives a clear explanation of pacing and then shows you how to achieve a solid commercial pace for any story, thus assuring reader engagement and more... read more
The world of how-to creative writing is filled with quick fixes, flavor-of-the-month techniques, and fortune cookie wisdom. This e-book has compiled the top ten creative writing myths that may writers accept as gospel, and then describes each of the myths to show you that they are not just innocent memes, but rather destructive and potentially derailing traps that can cripple your writing and ... read more
The reality of being an author today means that you can't do it all alone. The writing, designing, editing, publishing, and marketing of a book is no longer a one-man or one-woman show. Authors, if they want to put their best professional face forward, must now build their publishing team and rely on third party consultants to help them realize their dreams of publishing gold. But, most author... read more
Caroline Leavitt
Caroline Leavitt is at her mesmerizing best in this haunting, nuanced portrait of love, sisters, and the impossible legacy of family. It’s 1969, and sixteen-year-old Lucy is about to run away with a much older man to live off the grid in rural Pennsylvania, a rash act that will have vicious repercussions for both her and her older sister, Charlotte. As Lucy’s default caretaker for most of thei... read more
Caroline Leavitt
Two women running away from their marriages collide on a foggy highway, killing one of them. The survivor, Isabelle, is left to pick up the pieces, not only of her own life, but of the lives of the devastated husband and fragile son that the other woman, April, has left behind. Together, they try to solve the mystery of where April was running to, and why. As these three lives intersect, the b... read more
Caroline Leavitt
In 1956, Ava Lark rents a house with her twelve-year-old son, Lewis, in a desirable Boston suburb. Ava is beautiful, divorced, Jewish, and a working mom. She finds her neighbors less than welcoming. Lewis yearns for his absent father, befriending the only other fatherless kids: Jimmy and Rose. One afternoon, Jimmy goes missing. The neighborhood—in the throes of Cold War paranoia—seizes the opp... read more
This book offers a unique approach to storytelling, connecting the Enneagram system with classic story principles of character development, plot, and story structure to provide a seven-step methodology to achieve rapid story development. Using the nine-core personality styles underlying all human thought, feeling, and action, it provides the tools needed to understand and leverage the Enneagra... read more
If a story is going to fail, it will do so first at the premise level. Anatomy of a Premise Line: How to Master Premise and Story Development for Writing Success is the only book of its kind to identify a seven-step development process that can be repeated and applied to any story idea. This process will save you time, money, and potentially months of wasted writing. So whether you are trying ... read more
Jeff Lyons, Stephen David Brooks
London—Today—Guys named “Jack” are being killed across the city by a female serial killer with an almost supernatural ability to stay hidden. When Jack Tate, an emotionally bleak detective sergeant, is called in to investigate the brutal killings, he teams with Mae, an intellectual wannabe-detective, and Albert, Mae’s packrat psychic father, to unravel the killer’s taunting clues, until the de... read more
Jeff Lyons
One room. Six People. No way out. And every 13 minutes one of them dies—horribly—unless they can figure out what their nameless, faceless, and creepily mysterious captor wants from them. One woman holds the key to their survival or deaths. But, only if she faces her own bloody past and the earth-shattering truth of why they are all trapped together. Her final choice to own the truth can bring ... read more
Namtran Pham, December 2020
Marilyn M. Williams, August 2020
Sharon Thayer, July 2020
Rachel Yobs, July 2020
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Give me your dangling participles, your absent oxford commas, your run-on sentences yearning to be written correctly.
Long Beach, CA, United States
Experienced Editor specialising in Horror/Weird Fiction, Urban Fantasy, Crime, and YA; also nonfiction Film & TV, and Screenplays.
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK