2authors blog--The official blog of the award-winning writing team, V. and D. Povall.

Hello Readers! Happy Leap Day to you and yours.  We all have Julius Caesar to thank for leap years. We're sure most of you know that we have a leap day every four years because the Earth takes 365.25 days to complete one revolution around the sun. If you dig a little deeper though, that's actually not perfectly accurate--it's really 365.242181. So every leap day is adding extra time to our calendar.  Frogs leap. Get it? Not to get too much into the weeds here, but did you know we skip three leap days every 400 years? That's how we correct back to the actual calendar corresponding to Earth's orbit. How do we know which three leap days to skip? Well, that does get too much into the weeds, but the answer is every year that is divisible by 100 but not by 400 is one that we skip. 1700, 1800, 1900, NOT 2000, 2100, etc. Any baby born today is called a leapling. Happy birthday, little leaplings! Now, let's update you on what's been going on for us.  Things have been...

Hello Readers! We're back with some happy news to update you with.  You ready? We're coming to the LA Times Festival of Books!  Woohoo! The LA Times Festival of Books is the largest literary festival in the country. Every year over 500 storytellers come together for two days to showcase their work, celebrate storytelling, and connect with the community. There will be big-name talent, panel discussions, giveaways, educational activities, and prizes. And admission is free.  The festival kicks off April 19th with the 44th annual book prize awards ceremony. The main event takes place April 20-21 on the campus of USC in downtown Los Angeles. And we'll be there in our booth ready to meet and connect with all the readers and writers.  In addition, we'll have our fifth novel "An Educated Death" ready to share, along with our four previously published novels.  As the event draws closer, we'll have updated info on our booth location and when and where you can connec...

 Hello Readers!  *drys off* We hope all our SoCal readers weathered the extreme rain without too much damage. We got lucky and had no problems at all.  But goodness, that was a lot of water! After our blog last week about different routines and exercises you can do to spark creativity, we got interested in writing exercises. We haven't used them too often in our process, but reading about them inspired us to try some out, and we found some gems that we wanted to share with you.  So, if you're looking for some interesting prompts and exercises to get your writing flowing, check out our favorite new (to us) writing prompts below: See, exercise is fun! 1) Opposite - opposite Pick a pic that conjures a specific feeling in you. This image can be beautiful or terrifying or anything else, as long as it makes you feel something. Then, write a short story about that image. BUT, the short story flips the image on its head. If it's a gorgeous picture, make the reader feel the ...

Hello Readers! We hope all our SoCal readers are ready for the atmospheric river that's about to unload on us. The last storm brought some nasty flooding to our area near San Diego, so we'll have our fingers crossed for the next week or so.  Our blog for today is focused on our fellow writers. We wanted to offer y'all some ideas for sparking creativity. If you're looking to form a routine or break out of a slump, we have some suggestions to get yourself going and flowing--unblocked and free. Here are four of them. Even Clark Kent had trouble writing sometimes 1) Go for a walk   Our first suggestion couldn't be simpler. Walk. Going for a walk before you sit down to write can be very stimulating. Especially if you make a routine of it. Walking for 15-30 minutes gets the juices flowing and your brain thinking. It's like magic--except it's been well-documented already that walking improves cognitive performance. Another thing you could do is copy Hemingway, who ...