The Black Hole that Ate My Week (or How I’m Learning to Stop Kicking Myself for Not Writing)
Much writing advice can be boiled down to, “Write every day.” There may or may not be word counts attached, but in essence it’s that simple. Create a little something every day, and you’ll see multiple benefits. Keep at it, and with a page a day you’ve got the rough draft of a novel in a year. You also make changes in your mind, training yourself to produce words by habit the way you would learn a fancy toss-the-ball-in-the-air tennis serve day by day. (If the preponderance of hyphens make you think said tossed ball would likely land back on Read more…
Where do you Get Your Ideas? The Inspiration for Back to Lazarus
I’m just starting to feel my way around Goodreads Author Land. They have an “Ask the Author” section where readers can submit specific questions to authors, but there’s also a rotation of commonly asked questions. One of these caught my eye and my imagination more than I would have expected, so I thought I would share it here as well… Where did you get the idea for your most recent book? The seeds of Back to Lazarus were planted so long ago that I’d forgotten them, until I read this question and started digging in my brain and my notebooks. Read more…
That’s Why You Hire the Professionals, People! (Cover Design and Author Swag Edition)
Between my husband and me, there’s not a whole lot we won’t try to do ourselves. We’re (slowly) building our own house, so he’s done electrical and framing (a friend who shall remain nameless once framed himself into our house while working on a flare-topped ladder) and everything in between, with limited tools and limited electricity. I don’t think I’ve broken anything with a hammer or sliced anything unintended with a saw, and I’ve done a fair amount of sheetrock fairly poorly (my corners aren’t too bad but all of our walls have a lump in the middle). I’ve also Read more…
5 Lessons Learned in my First Week as a Newly Self-Published Author
As a completely new author with no fan base, no one on my newsletter but my mom, and a brand spanking new website but no real platform or brand or other fancy marketing words yet, I knew that I wouldn’t exactly be rocketing to the top of the charts. I’m in it for the long haul, which translates to, “I never really thought about the first week except as something I had to pass through on the way to the first year(s).” Here’s some of what I learned, living through the first week without having bothered to think about it Read more…
Book Reviews and Ratings Part II: A Code of Conduct?
When I first downloaded Goodreads on my (long lost and lamented) iPhone years ago, I thought it was the best app ever. The bar code scanner almost made my head explode. It is a great resource for a lot of people, but I’ve never used it consistently, and it turns out it wasn’t right for me at the time. As I said in my last post, I’m not a big reviewer, and I wasn’t looking for a community. I just wanted something to help me track what books I’d already read and which ones I wanted to read. But if Read more…
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