Category: Uncategorized

Essays by Shalon Sims on education, creative writing and literacy

Using a Strategic Plan to organize and plan a novel

Have you been working on a novel or other large creative project for a while, and feeling like organizing and managing the project has become a big challenge? Have a million ideas captured in a million documents or none at all, just free-floating in your head? In this blog post, I’ll outline a method for…
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Fear & horror in children’s literature – Review of truly terrifying kids & YA books

Part 1: Lost in the Woods I am fascinated by the special kind of horror that can only be found in stories about and for children. Since the very first children’s books by Perrault and the Grimm brothers, and before that, in folktales and oral traditions, stories about children have so often been gruesome and…
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Books about fiction writing

In this post, I’ve curated a list of my favourite books on writing craft.  I’ve split the list into two sections: one is for people who are just starting out in their creative writing, with great books to help you develop your muse and learn some important skills that all writers need. The second section…
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Writing Resources

The following resources are in my media library from some of my blog posts: my personal writing style guide my quick reference sheet on Writing Advanced Sentences (with some basic grammar rules that everyone needs!) my favourite free mind-mapping tool: xmind.  Great for mapping out your complicated plot-lines and characters in an easy to visualise format YWriter is…
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