Smirk is haunting me, or would that be: taunting me? So much so that my alter ego (a.k.a. pen name). R.L. Gray, made a meme about it then later tweeted her pain. “Smirk is my current nemesis. I hadn’t noticed it for eons. Now it’s everywhere and IMO it’s...
Typing Someone’s Novel, Part 2
This is the second installment (read the first if you haven’t) of ramblings inspired by an exercise to make me slow down and think about the mechanics of what I’m trying to do in my own work by typing out someone else’s novel. And: it’s working! And starting sentence...
I Want My Two Dollars
At what price should I publish my eBook on Amazon KDP? Well, I’m a visual person so here’s a comparison chart for Amazon royalty rates vs. some list prices vs. what the author makes. I only ran the numbers out to $14.99 since that’s around where many eBooks I read...
Get Those Wheels Turning
One of the blogs I follow, Janet Reid, Literary Agent had a post recently about right thing/wrong reason. and how it (and its inverse) can help make characters more complex and intriguing. It got the hamster wheel in my brain turning and I was just going to post a...
DOGS! A 2019 Weekly Planner: Featuring {month}
Yeeeha, I finally got my first low-content items published through Amazon. It was a fun, frustrating, and yet simple process. There was a definite learning curve for me, most especially with the plethora of image compression settings in PowerPoint and Acrobat. But they’ve been approved and are LIVE! I...
First Scenes Compared
Earlier this month I started typing out someone else’s novel — see part I of that series if you haven’t read it yet and want to know “why?!” or what my thoughts were as I might reference them below — and I’ve also been drafting my first snack-sized romance...
Typing Someone’s Novel, Part 1
Ooooookay, so I’m doing an exercise typing out a published novel word for word to “feel” and study the mechanics of it. Why? To try to work out some pain points I’ve hit. I read about this technique somewhere on the internet and filed it away in the gray...
Tips for Tool #5
As a follow-on to my first post, Tool #5, here are 5 tips for using ProWritingAid. #1: Be open to suggestion. Almost every time I thought “unh-unh!” but stepped back to consider how I might, juuust for the sake of argument, adjust my phrasing, I could. For the better....
Empty the Kitchen Sink
If you read my post on Let’s Talk About Death you might remember where I said we’d all look back on the blurb and laugh. If not, please go back and take a look. No worries, I’ll wait right here. Back? Excellent. That blurb alludes to about, oh, I...