Hey Folks, First, Happy New Year. I hope last night was fun and safe for everyone. Second, you might have noticed I didn’t post last Tuesday, on Christmas Day. I’d like to say that was out of reverence or whatver, but it wasn’t. I wanted to leave up the post on Challenges for another week. After all, today’s a great day to begin a new challenge. (grin) Let me be clear: if writing fiction wasn’t the … Read more
Hey Folks, Well, I’m leaving this post up for another week. Not because I don’t have plenty else to write about, but because… It’s that time of year again. The new year is rapidly approaching, and with it comes new opportunities and new resolutions. A time to reset writing goals and maybe jumpstart our writing. What better way to start than with a personal challenge? We use challenges to stretch ourselves just a bit beyond what … Read more
Hey folks, Recently, a writing friend sent me a link to an article that seems to indicate Scribd, a major subsciption service, is not paying authors. To read the original article, see http://writersweekly.com/this-weeks-article/scribd-com-is-copyright-infringement-their-business-model-and-are-you-a-victim-too-by-wilfried-f-voss. It’s an interesting article. But we’re all in charge of our own career to one degree or the other. In the end, my only advice would be to not distribute to Scribd (or do), and to do a search and remove any of … Read more
Hey Folks, Okay, first, to get us on the same page, what I call a “tag line” is what some call a “narrative beat.” I guess there are other names for it too, but here’s why I call it a tag line. When characters are engaging in dialogue, there are two types of narrative that may accompany the dialogue. One is the tag line. The other, I call a brief descriptive narrative. They are distinctly different … Read more
Hi Folks, In a recent post (as I write this), Dean Wesley Smith wrote “…all that matters is the writing, not the end product.” That seemingly innocuous statement is only one of the many truly major lessons I’ve learned from him and attempted to pass along. To establish credentials, Dean Wesley Smith is a USA Today best selling novelist with over 200 novels to his credit. He has also written several hundred short stories, almost all … Read more
Hey Folks, Thriller author James Scott Bell, in the Kill Zone blog back in June, wrote “Authors I Have Learned From: John D. MacDonald.” The article is chock full of gems if you dig just a little. You can read the post for yourself. I’ll reference it at the end. But for this post, I’ll offer a few hints at those gems, then elaborate a little on each of them. To begin, there is much to … Read more
Hey Folks, Today we have a guest post from USA Today best selling writer Dean Wesley Smith. I’ve added a comment at the end. Enjoy. Dangers of Not Trusting The Creative Voice Things Stop When You Lose Faith In The Creative Voice… I watch this loss all the time and hear about it from hundreds of writers over every year. Not trusting your creative voice is deadly. This came up a couple days ago when I … Read more
Hey Folks, This is a bonus “extra” post, not in the regular rotation. It’s a short bit I thought you might find amusing and, with any luck, useful. I first saw “The Basic Rules of Flight” in an article by US Navy Pilot Nicole Scherer in the August 2018 issue of Air & Space Smithsonian magazine. The Basic Rules of Flight 1. Try to stay in the middle of the air. 2. Do not go near … Read more
Hey Folks This time I thought I’d go back to a crime/mystery/suspense novel. In The Implications, a body washes up on the beach in a normally quiet rural town. Naturally, the marshal suddenly finds he has his hands full. But when the body proves to have ties to known mobsters, the marshal’s job gets a lot tougher very quickly. And the coroner’s brand new assistant being a dead ringer for the marshal’s deceased wife only adds … Read more
Hey Folks, Today’s post is a short but excellent guest post I purloined from my friend, Dan Baldwin. It first appeared as a Tip of the Week over at Four Knights Press (http://www.fourknightspress.com/). Enjoy. Tip of the Week: Let Barking Dogs Lie “That damned reviewer hated my novel!” “The boss hated my e-mail!” “I got an F on my essay!” “They rejected my short story!” “They panned my poem!” Regardless of what you write, you will … Read more