Tag: writing
The Reaction I Hoped For
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…
Five Minutes To Midnight
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…
I’m not rich yet
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…
Say what you want in the way that you choose
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…
Review Time
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…
A quick word about grammar and punctuation
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…
Mourning the OED
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…
Working through Writer’s Block
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…
The Location Worksheet
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…
On Staying Organized
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,…
