By Lara Helmling If you’re not using the method I’m about to teach you for your Instagram account, you are missing out big time. You probably know that Instagram is the most effective social media platform right now. Do you also know that publishers expect you to have thousands of followers? To make it even more fun, they expect you …
How Are Those Resolutions Working For You?
By Patricia Bradley It’s January 16th, one day past the halfway mark in January. So, how are those resolutions you made at the beginning of the month working for you? Or have you already cast them aside, broken and mangled? Raise your hand if that’s you. That’s me waving my hand. Oh, I’ve not broken them all. I’m still doing …
To Follow or Not to Follow the Yellow Brick Road of Writing Rules
By Ane Mulligan I began my writing journey as a playwright. I learned how to write good dialogue by default. As the creative arts director for my church, I’d write weekly sermon illustration sketches. With the first few scripts I wrote, my actors would change the way they said the lines. When I realized what they did, I listened carefully …
My Road to Self-Publishing – Part 1
By Kathy J. Perry After my dad passed, I began evaluating what I was doing with my life. Suddenly, it seemed all too short. I just didn’t feel like what I was doing really made a difference. I felt like impacting youth was really what I wanted to do. I had been a teacher earlier in life and feel that …
Acts of Gratitude – Paying it Forward
By Lenora Livingston “Paying it Forward” is an expression for describing the recipient of a good deed repaying it to others instead of to the original benefactor. What better way can a person show their thankfulness than to participate in the rippling effects of goodness. At age 78, I wish I could go back and thank my teachers who most …
Finding Acceptance in a Tough Writing Industry
By Emily Conrad When responses to my debut novel started to come in from my launch team, a friend asked if the positive feedback encouraged me. Though, yes, the praise was a momentary boost, and no, I don’t want to consider what might’ve happened in my heart if the initial response had been the opposite, I had to confess that …
Perfectionism: How Can Something So “Perfect” Be So Wrong?
by Kathy Harris I’m a perfectionist. And that’s not a good thing. Taken to the extreme, perfectionism can lead to serious psychological issues and is, in fact, on the rise, especially among young people. (See, Harvard Business Review, January 26, 2018.) But, even those of us who have a casual acquaintance with perfectionism will find that our work can suffer …
Ten Wrongs Don’t Make a Writer
How to Avoid the Top Ten Fatal Flaws in Fiction By Kathleen Y’Barbo It is not yet 2019, but it won’t be long until we’re several weeks—or months into the new year, the time when New Year’s resolutions begin to lose their shine and some of us begin to wonder if we should have resolved NOT to make any …
Christmases that Rock Your Characters’ World
By Susan A.J. Lyttek When I signed up to write this Christmas blog post, I had dozens of ideas on what I would write about. I knew, somehow, the star of my post would be my seasonal mystery Plundered Christmas. It still will be, just not in any of the directions I had originally considered. For instance, I had notes …
Character Description: Two Challenges
By Jean Kavich Bloom As a fiction editor, I find novelists can encounter a couple of challenges when it comes to character descriptions: (1) keeping track of them so they don’t accidently give their heroine, for instance, blue eyes in chapter 1 and brown eyes in chapter 12, and (2) conveying them to readers more creatively than what can seem …