Mark your calendar Monday, February 8, 1:00 PM ET, I’ll be a guest at MinddogTV. Matt Napo will be interviewing me about my latest novel, The Rose Guardian. MinddogTV is a podcast that encourages independent free thinking. They seek to open the doors to provocative subjects and bring fresh ideas and perspectives to light. MinddogTV discusses topics that inspire different points of view. The channel also includes videos from Matt Napo’s music and blog. Based…
How to bring your work to market In the past 20 years the reasonable choices available to a writer have expanded considerably, and the delicacy around some of those choices has diminished. Was a time if you wished to publish your work, you were left with some very stark avenues. You could choose to publish through an established publishing house, and used to be you didn’t require an agent to be read by any of…
Informed opinion There seems to be an accepted protocol that once you’ve finished your novel, you then put together a group of willing, knowledgeable readers — beta readers — to do what is essentially a market test. The reasoning behind this method seems sound: you want to be sure, after all your revisions and polishing, that you’ve crafted this story well, that readers will get what you’ve tried to convey. Retaining beta readers is a form…
So, you’ve written a thing You’ve just keyed in the final word, placed punctuation, and the sense of accomplishment that settles over you is profound. You’re done. Or are you? At this point it’s all too easy to think there isn’t another thing that needs doing to that piece of writing. You’ve been careful throughout, not only with the mechanics of good writing — punctuation, spelling, grammar — but with plot, literary devices, character development,…
A good writer is an informed writer I remember interviewing biographer and historian Marian Fowler for The Canadian Author and Bookman, back when the Canadian Authors Association published that wonderful writers’ periodical. She was particular about her research, always digging for accuracy and primary sources, and because of that her work rang with truth, a fact which sometimes garnered her a bit of trouble as was evidenced when she wrote her history on Blenheim. Seems…