Reviews – Page 2

PROMPT ME by YA Author, Robin Woods (Review)

PROMPT ME by Robin Woods is the perfect workbook to jump start your creativity.

Whether you are a seasoned writer or you’re simply a creative thinker and wish to exercise your writing chops, Robin Woods’ PROMPT ME workbook has countless prompts and exercises to fuel your imagination. I’ll even add that, if you’re an English teacher and you use bell work to get your students to focus, you may want to add this workbook to your repertoire of writing exercises.

The prompts range from photographs to one-liners and cater to all genres and POVs. First and third person prompts include gems like: “No matter how hard I tried, my feet couldn’t find purchase. Panic set in and my palms began to sweat …” and “When they tore down the wall, they discovered …”.

The booklet is organized so that you could just jump right into any section or simply start from page one. Journaling pages to explore your thoughts are sprinkled between the various prompts-all categorized-making it super easy to bounce around as your creative whims carry you.

There’s even a section that lets you do writing sprints with predetermined dialogue prompts. Robin Woods also includes lists of phrases that are easy to add into a paragraph to make your writing pop, like this alliterative one: “slick surface”.

Prompt Me isn’t just loaded with different types of prompts, it also includes several fill-in-the-blank charts for defining your characters far beyond hair and eye color. Some of the exercises have multiple choices that cater to just about any type of creative writing from Sci-Fi to Romance. And there’s also a list of writing prompt questions that explore self-discovery, roll play, and listing, as well as Haiku poetry exercises—a goldmine of personal journaling/bell work prompts.

Basically, this booklet has it all!

If you’re not familiar with Robin Woods, take at look at her website. She’s the author of several young adult novels, including The Watchers Series. Her site boasts a great writer’s tools section (just like the reference section in the back of this workbook) which is an excellent go-to for tips.

You can buy PROMPT ME on Amazon for $9.95 right now, and the best part is it ships through Prime, so you can start using your new workbook the day after tomorrow!

Fiction Writing Journal and Workbook (Review)

If you’re a hands-on person and you’re starting from scratch as a newbie writer or you need to capture and organize all your random thoughts and scribbles to prepare to write your next novel, then Robin Woods’ Fiction Writing Journal & Workbook is meant for you.

Fiction Writing Journal & Workbook by Young Adult author, Robin Woods, is organized with a reasonable, progressive flow to construct your novel, yet it’s easy to navigate back and forth between sections to suit your writing approach.

It’s full of all kinds of writerly information, graphic organizers, worksheets, and plenty of room for journaling to get your novel up and running.

So …

I recently decided to quell a trilogy plan I had been working on for a while that accompanied the current novel I’m querying. (Yep, I’m still hanging in there.) Instead, I am pressing forward with a sequel that can function as a stand-alone by branching a new love story from two minor characters in the first novel. In other words, I’m going with a two-part series.

My reasoning for this big change is because the premise for the third novel is just too exciting to keep it waiting, and the guts of the second novel could, with a little nip and tuck, easily serve up an overall better plot if I use that premise as the inciting moment and just move on.

Enter Robin Woods’ Fiction Writing Journal & Workbook.

It happened to be a happy accident that I was ready to delve into making sense of my independent sequel (is that even a term??) simultaneous to my long-time friend offering me a free copy of her workbook. Yes, you read that right, we’re friends, for, like, decades.

So …

Instead of just reading through the informational parts of the workbook and blasting an unbiased review all over the Internet once I’d finished (no doubt garnering some eye rolls and tsks or wonderings about whether friends ever really give friends ‘honest reviews’), I thought I’d show how I actually used the workbook and prove why I give it the maximum stars.

You see …

I have all these colorful spiral notebooks—a stack of them to be exact, and they have all kinds of disorderly information in them that, when pulled apart and mixed around, make perfect sense to me. Character studies, setting notes, plot points—you name it—and somewhere in my stack of madness there might actually be a method to this budding new sequel I want to pursue.

In addition to my teetering stack of stuff n’ stuff full of all kinds of random this n’ that I have accumulated over the last year, I also have lots of tidbits on my iPhone in the Notes App full of my thoughts-on-the-go, and I even have two Word Docsx outlines I had once planned for the trilogy plus oodles of rough draft writing to boot.

In other words, I’m hands-on and all over the place when I prepare to write. I just am.

And …

I was in need of a singular place to vet and compile before typing everything up into a functioning outline because I was dying to get this WIP rolling in the right direction.

Can you see how it was destiny? My mess and Robin Woods’ workbook were made for each other.

I was not kidding when I said BIG stack.

HUGE.

Just look at it. ———————————>

All kinds of random going on in that mess. Two books’ worth of ideas that I needed to boil down into one poignant, romantic plot …

… Then this happened.

I found this workbook satisfied my need to write things down in a journal. Don’t get me wrong—I love using my laptop for all parts of the writing process—but this workbook helped me scratch that itch to put pencil on paper, so that I could compile my final outline. The fact that it has everything I need in graphic organizers to help me reel in the stack of madness makes this workbook the bomb.

Here’s a peek at the table of contents to give you a better idea of what the book contains to help you organize your future best seller:

Robin Woods’ website, http://www.robinwoodsfiction.com, also contains lots of helpful information for writers of all genres. She’s a YA author of The Watcher Series and has six novels and one work of non-fiction under her belt. Definitely, check out her site, and, if you like a hands-on approach to organizing your fiction ideas, her book is the tool you need.