Love is as much about pain as passion, loss as lust. For the hope of keeping it, lovers sometimes sacrifice all.

Ray Travis wanted to be a writer, It was his sole ambition, But as things do so often, Life got in the way. Ray Travis was a good writer, Everyone said so, Although few actually read his words, Life got in the way. Ray Travis wore a uniform, Fell in…

If you saw my office, you might mistake it for a junky spare room.  The only clue that there is anything special about it is an oversized desk and the computer—and books, lots of books.  With only a single chair at the desk, it does not invite visitors. When I…

I had an interesting experience the other evening.  A cousin of mine, very much into genealogy, stopped by to visit my mother and talk to her about our family history.  Neither of us had been back to our old home town in more than forty years. My cousin talked at…

“I’m not a writer,” he said, “not a real one.  If I were a real writer I could pour whiskey in one end and shit novels out the other.”  From the diary of Ray Travis. © Copyright 2016 by Kevin Fraleigh.

I thought about cutting my hair and beard, but that would be unfair to all the fans I don’t have yet. Addendum: As a gift to my wife upon her return from a trip in April to see the grandkids, I did shave off my beard. The wonderful thing about…

It is a cold and wet Sunday, here in Central Florida. It’s a good day to stay inside, have a cup of tea, and read a book I haven’t written yet. © Copyright 2016 by Kevin Fraleigh.

In my files somewhere I have the beginnings of a story about a man trapped in a dead-end job doing meaningless work who sees the walls of his office melt, revealing another world beyond. I wasn’t terribly satisfied with what I developed because it seemed to be turning into another…

I thought of this the other day and can’t seem to get it out of my head. Imagine writing a scene where a character intends to commit suicide. He is emotionally at the end of his rope. He sees no other way out. So he makes his way to a…

The worst thing a writer can say is, “Hey, what’s on TV tonight?” The second worst thing a writer can say is, “I’ll just be on the internet for a minute…” And there it goes, the best intentions for starting a new story, editing one of those fifty trunk novels,…

The weekend following my last post, my wife and I drove over to Largo to see my niece run the mile and 800 meter races in her track meet.  For us that’s like a two and a half hour drive.  Normally that’s okay, we can find things to talk about…

Last week the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced that the dreaded Doomsday Clock was moved to a minute closer to midnight.  For reasons you can read here, the Doomsday Clock now stands at five minutes to midnight.  Midnight being defined as the end to everything.  We have been closer of…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Yesterday I made the observation that the publishing industry still seems driven by the paper paradigm and I can understand why. I have friends that go on and on about how they will never give up their stocks of paper books. They like the feel of them. They like the…

Okay, so it may sound like I’m back peddling, but comments by Catana to yesterday’s post gave me reasons to reconsider my plan for a whole series of books from my original novel.  She provided links to a couple of blogs that suggested that the ideal length for a novel…

Being an analytical sort of guy, I decided to see exactly where I stood should I decide to publish my novel as a series instead of one volume. The results didn’t really surprise me, because of the way I developed the story.  As you can see, Books 4, 5, and…

Like many of you, my weekends aren’t for writing, just the opposite.  My weekends are full of working in the yard and catching up on all those things that tend to slide while I’m at work during the week. Spring is here, the weather is beautiful, and who wants to…

Well, I think I’m finally getting the hang of this blog.  I’ve reworked the About page and added a Bio page. I’ve also added some tags that should make it easier for folks to find the blog. I’ve even had a couple of comments (okay, one was my wife), but…

There is something about getting published that has always bugged me, although electronic publishing has fixed this to a degree. Getting published costs money. Lots of little costs to be sure, but the costs add up. Consider the cost of mailing letters of inquiry and partial or whole manuscripts. Then…

I didn’t start out to write a novel. I just had an idea. In this case I had the rather vague thought of a young man who wakes up one day to a world that was utterly silent and in which he was absolutely alone. It was to be a…

Okay, so last year I finished writing my first novel, over 332K words.  That having been accomplished, the next question is, “What the heck do I do with it?” It’s all well and good to be a novelist, but if no one ever reads it, was it worth the effort?…

Somewhere in my closet there is a notebook with dozens of yellowed, worn pages of prose and poetry I wrote in the late 60’s and early 70’s, back in a time when I still believed the pinnacle of the writer’s craft was to have his work captured on paper and…