Nikki Loftin

And no, I’m not talking about your kids or mine, even though they may indeed be “characters.” I’m talking about those kids we kid’s fiction writers create on the page and then — somewhere between writing The End and the call from your friend/agent/beta reader with revision ideas/suggestions/orders/demands to beef up your plot — we [...]

Well, I have a thousand things to do — revisions to plan, manuscripts to finish, lunches to pack, and many, many glasses of wine to drink — so it must be time for a blog post.
I promised a post on writing groups, but I’m mostly planning on telling you what I’ve got going on right [...]

Hiya, Peeps! Not much to report this week, besides writing like my life depends on it. (Does it? A good question.) So, instead of coming up with something witty and fabulous to say, I will help you blow a couple of hours at a writerly site. Check this out. Authors tell you how to pronounce [...]

This week, a friend invited me and thirteen other middle-aged chicks to her house for a night of food, fun, and Bunco. (Which, for me, is like saying, Margaritas, Mojitos, and Root Canal. I loathe Bunco. But I like this woman very much and I’d never seen her house, so…)
When I walked in the front [...]

I just finished reading Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, and it spurred me to action. I decided, after reading her incredibly funny and depressing chapters about how disappointing and heartbreaking getting published can be (and here I thought the being unpublished part was sucking eggs), I had to [...]

Merry Christmas Eve, Blog Friends!
It’s cold in Texas today and getting colder — beginning to feel (at last) a bit like Christmas. I got a stocking stuffer this week already — an essay of mine will appear in The Ultimate Christian Living anthology, out next March. Yay! (Of course, Santa may have to work a [...]

Ho Ho Ho! Here’s a link to a funny, fun video put together (and performed!) by a phenomenal picture book author, Kim Norman. Her newest book, Crocodaddy, is darling. Did I mention she’s also a critique partner of mine? (Okay, mostly she critiques my sad little picture books. When she sends a manuscript to the [...]

My agent-sister, Lisa DesRochers, nominated this blog for an award, the Scrap Heap Award. No, wait. Was it the Honest Crap Award? Something like that. As you may be aware, I refuse to post anything on this blog other than text. In my opinion, I’m one cut and paste away from putting pictures of my [...]

Someday I’ll have a book published and, right inside the cover, I’ll have an acknowledgments page — a crisp white sheet where I can list the names of the people who have helped me on my writing journey.
Of course, I don’t have that page yet, so this post will have to serve as a practice [...]

I just got back from NYC, from attending the wonderful Backspace conference, meeting my (darling, smart, funny, ambitious) agent, Suzie Townsend, and painting the town my own particular shade of red. (It’s more a fuchsia, really.) The whole experience was so fairy-tale-ish, I couldn’t believe it was me living my life there. It was like [...]