Latest Submissions: I just submitted a short-story for the October issue of eFiction Magazine.  The title of the piece is “Christmas”, for lack of a better name and for no other reason than it takes place at Christmas.  If it gets accepted, I look forward to your opinions about the…

Here it is.  The first sneak peek at the cover art for Any Tomorrow: The Curse, the second eBook in the Any Tomorrow Trilogy.  Let me know what you think! © Copyright 2011 by Kevin Fraleigh.  

[Note that the promotion referred to in this post is way past over, but you can still enjoy the Any Tomorrow Trilogy in Any Tomorrow Complete. Thanks.] What a deal!  All I ask is that you provide feedback about what you liked and didn’t like about it.  That’s it!  Just…

As many of my readers know, I am a veteran.  I served for twenty years in the United States Air Force.  I don’t make a big deal out of it.  I don’t have regular contact with other veterans.  I don’t belong to the American Legion or the VFW.  Yet recently…

I’ve said before that inspiration is where you find it.  Inspiration can even be found in adventures provided for a nearly four year old.  All you have to do is keep your senses open to the world around you. Two Fridays ago, five of us, including my granddaughter, Hannah, boarded…

Thanks to my friends at eFiction Magazine’s Book Marketing Group, I’ve transformed my long, unfocused product description into a more dynamic pitch for my eBook, Any Tomorrow: The Calling.  Advice from eFiction editor Doug Lance and group member Richard Sutton helped me rebuild my product description following some simple general…

[Note to the reader: As of post time Tropical Storm Emily is no more.  However, since I already had the post written I decided to go with it.] Depending where and when you are when you read this, Tropical Storm Emily may or may not be a big deal.  If…

He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision–he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: `The horror! The horror!’  (Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness, via Link) My wife will not read my books or stories.  She says they are too dark. …

It’s hard to get feedback.  Relatives are prone to either sugar coat their opinions or say nothing, and most strangers won’t be bothered.  For most writers it’s difficult to establish a personal relationship, even virtual, with readers and make them comfortable enough to honestly express their opinions.  Authors of self-published…

Cool!  eFiction Magazine has included a story of mine, “Another Twenty-Five Minutes”, in its August edition.  It’s free to read on-line or download.  Consider getting a free subscription.  eFiction provides a platform for some very creative indie writers. Being included in eFiction is cool for a number of reasons.  The…

This summer has been difficult for me as a writer because, by necessity, I have had to be other focused.  As I have mentioned in several past posts, that whole work-family-sleep thing really gets in the way.  One would think that as you get older, as your children get married…

This past Friday I picked up a newlywed couple at Port Canaveral.  They had just returned from their honeymoon cruise.  The groom was the son of an old friend of ours and my wife let them park in our yard.  It was the safer and cheaper alternative to leaving the…

Yay!  O happy day!  The Oxford English Dictionary on-line (OED) is back as a free service.  I don’t know why they changed to a pay subscription only model, but it is once again free and that’s all that matters. Are you as excited as I am? Maybe Not? If you’re…

When I joined the website for eFiction magazine two of the entries for the profile were favorite authors and favorite books.  I had to stop and think about this for a moment.  I wanted to answer honestly, but at the same time I wanted to sound well read, even literate….

So my eBook, Any Tomorrow: The Calling, has been out at Amazon and all the major eBook distributors for a couple of months.  How come I’m not rich yet?  Gosh, if you read the user forums at Kindle, it seems like everyone who posts is selling upwards of 900 copies…

This weekend, instead of joining in the traditional American July 4th rituals of barbeque, beer, and shopping, I have undertaken to replace the toilet and floor in our guest bathroom.  This is, of course, only the beginning.  Replacing the mirror and light fixtures, regrouting the shower, and painting the bathroom…

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, being able to say what I want in the way that I choose.  If you follow the news at all, you are probably aware that in many places in the world stating an opinion, writing about certain things, or acting in a…

This past weekend my wife and I drove to Northern Virginia and back, approximately 1600 miles round trip.  Up on Friday, back on Sunday.  It was worth it.  We got to see our granddaughter’s first ballet recital. Maybe it was a little crazy, but when families are geographically separated, that’s…

As I sit here contemplating the weekly Bible study I attend with my wife, I can’t help but think the role that religion plays in my writing.  I don’t intentionally write about religion, either the institution or the activity, but it always seems to be there somewhere.   Religion in some…

Okay, so my first eBook, Any Tomorrow: The Calling, is available from the major eBook distributors, including http://www.amazon.com/, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/, http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/, and http://www.smashwords.com/. I’ve successfully self-published through Smashwords and Amazon, creating every aspect of the publication, including the cover art. I even blog about the self-publishing experience at http://anytomorrow.com/ My dilemma…

Fiction is great.  Fiction is wonderful.  I love fiction, especially an edgy mix of horror, fantasy, and psychological tension.  Nothing to my mind can beat it.  However, no matter how wild the fiction is, there will be a point of tangency between the fictional world and reality.  In order to…

Well, not reviewed quite yet. Last week I posted to a writer’s group on LinkedIn and very shortly after got a reply from Agy Wilson (Literature Correspondent; Maine at Examiner.com) to read Any Tomorrow: The Calling, review it, and post about it. After I read her offer, it took me…

Grammar and punctuation, that’s right, the subjects that caused so many sleepless nights in grammar school (elementary school).  Grammar and punctuation with all those nit-picky rules about clauses, apostrophes, colons, periods, semicolons, tenses, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum.   No, I’m not going into all that.  Let if suffice to say that…

Now that Any Tomorrow: The Calling is available at the major eBook distributors (Amazon, Diesel, Barnes and Nobel, Smashwords) and a few intrepid folks have downloaded copies of it, I thought I’d provide a place on the blog for readers to provide feedback about the book. The Review, Critique, Suggest…

Okay, so my eBook, Any Tomorrow: The Calling, is out there, published, available at Amazon, Smashwords, and Diesel, soon to be at Barnes and Noble, Apple iBookstore, Sony, and Kobo.  My eBook is out there floating around in the ether with thousands of other eBooks.  It’s out there, but how…

I discovered yesterday that Any Tomorrow: The Calling is now in the Diesel eBook Store catalog.  Same reasonable price, just $2.99.  I’d really like to see sales from each of the venues (Diesel, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Sony etc.) so I’ll know how much of that $2.99 I actually get…

It has finally happened.  The last great bastion of the English language has sequestered itself into elitism.  The Holy OED, the Oxford English Dictionary on-line, is now available only by paid subscription.  What was the ideal reference for writers has lowered itself into the abyss of filthy lucre and restricted…

Writer’s block.  We all get it.  Writer’s groups on-line are full of posts seeking the magic cure. There is only one cure for writer’s block ― to write.  Wow, that seems counterintuitive.  How can I write if I’m blocked?  How about this… Let’s say you’re writing a novel and you…

In an earlier post I discussed the Character Worksheet I used to keep track of all the characters mentioned in my Any Tomorrow Trilogy.  The worksheet simply lists the name and a basic description of each character.  This tool is very handy to make sure names aren’t too similar or…

Today’s post is all about Smashwords.com because Any Tomorrow: The Calling has finally been accepted into the Smashwords Premium Catalog.  This means that, besides being listed on the Smashwords website, it will be distributed to a range of other sellers also.  The following schedule was provided for distribution. Channel Next…

What I am reading ― As a geographer, I find Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer an absolute must read.  His use of process of exploration as a metaphor for the discovery process we, as writers, use is apt and dead on.  More than that it…

I was planning on writing a nice long article about how important organization is when writing an eBook of over 300k words, especially if the action takes place over a long timeline, several continents, and involves hundreds of major and minor characters.  Just trying to not repeat names is difficult,…

In one of my first posts I mentioned that I developed a rather detailed worksheet to keep track of my characters, locations, and specialized language references.  As I continued my editing of Any Tomorrow: The Curse and Any Tomorrow: The Culling, I thought I might update the worksheet. I have…

If you go to Amazon.com and search for books with keyword of “horror”, you’ll get 56,575 results, but only 9,202 are Kindle Editions. If you search for books with the keyword “speculative fiction”, only 745 results are returned, but only 320 are Kindle Editions. If you search for a book…

You know, sometimes the most obvious things are the easiest to miss.  Both Kindle and Smashwords provide the option to post a detailed description and keywords (tags) to help potential buyers discover your eBook.  In the rush to get the eBook text loaded, it’s easy to miss those couple of…

In the latest news from Smashwords, Any Tomorrow: The Calling has passed the automated vetting process and is now up for review by the “vetting review team”.  I suspect that passing the automated vetting had something to do with the updated file I submitted on Monday, although I was never…

Last night I submitted updated files for Any Tomorrow: The Calling to Amazon and Smashwords.  It was a surprisingly simple process for both distributors, however after almost 24 hours I am #932 in the queue for processing at Smashwords.  It takes time, but I’m okay with that.  After all it…

Writing is a hard thing.  There is nothing easy about it. I now have the first book of my trilogy, Any Tomorrow: The Calling, out on Amazon and Smashwords (inclusion in the Smashwords Premium Catalog is still pending). I have the second book in the series, Any Tomorrow: The Curse,…

As I have been waiting to see what would happen with Any Tomorrow: The Calling and have started talking it up among chat rooms and groups, I’ve also been final editing the second book in the trilogy, Any Tomorrow: The Curse.  In fact, Any Tomorrow: The Curse is almost ready for…

For those of you who haven’t submitted an eBook to Amazon (Kindle Direct Publishing) or Smashwords for distribution there are a couple of things to keep in mind regarding time.  Assuming your eBook file has been properly formatted and you have an acceptable piece of cover art, getting your eBook…

Okay, so my eBook is active on Amazon.com in the .mobi format for Kindle and available in a variety of formats from Smashwords.com.  I must say that getting the eBook into both distributors was much easier than I first thought it would be.  Using the Smashwords Style Guide was very…

Okay, maybe the exclamation point is a bit over the top, but Any Tomorrow: The Calling has been submitted to Smashwords and Kindle.  It will be listed for $2.99. It will take a few days before the eBook shows up on Smashwords and even longer before it gets distributed to…

cjsand asked for it, so here it is.  A teaser, a little hint about the storyline of the Any Tomorrow trilogy. I guess I should have provided this before, but up until very recently I wasn’t completely sure what form the novel would take, or even if it would be…

Please note that this page may contain one or more links to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate, if you click a link, follow it to Amazon, and buy the item, I get paid for providing the link. Purchasing the item through the link will cost you nothing extra, but will…

It’s an unfortunate truth that even the most well thought out plan is subject to the demands and restrictions of the real world.  A few days ago I thought that all I had left to do was to create my cover art, create a .mobi format file, and submit my…

I am glad to say that I have finally finished editing for content.  I think I’ve caught as many dropped words, extra spaces, misused words, and problems with specialized vocabulary that I reasonably expect to.  I have also begun editing for format using the Simplified Guide to Building a Kindle…

Well, we’re almost there, just a few more pages to edit and I think I’ll be ready to begin the process of Kindlizing (is that even a word?) my eBook.  I’ll start with Kindle because I imagine that by the time I have the format down for Kindle, it will…

As I work my way through this writing and editing process, I am constantly amazed by the all the changes I’ve experienced. For instance, I’ve finally decided that my novel will now be a trilogy.  It started out as a thought, then grew and grew as plots and subplots developed…

Everyone wants their novel to be perfect, but how many novels have you read that contain absolutely no errors? Even novels by well known authors published by major publishing houses contain errors. Nothing major, perhaps a small typo, a transposed letter, or word. It does happen. Human error is inevitable….

Having decided on a publication strategy, morphing my 330,000 word novel into a trilogy, I am once again in the throes of editing, reviewing, and revising. I have three main goals in this process. My first goal is to wind up with tight, concise, well crafted story. My second goal…