It’s not so much a rule as a repeated observation. While the plural of anecdote isn’t data, there comes a point where something happens often enough that one has to believe there’s something other than divine intervention at work. The observation is that many authors don’t begin to get traction until they’ve published five novels….
Category: Blog
How to Write Memorable Villains
Villains. You can’t have a good story without them. We loathe them. We hate them. Sometimes, we admire them. While we know the protagonist, the hero, must prevail, deep down inside, we sometimes still root for the bad guy. So how do we create a memorable villain? The first thing we have to remember, to…
When I’m Sixty-Four
“Will you still need me, will you still feed me?” Fill in the blank… Of course: “…when I’m sixty-four.” Yeah, I played the HELL out of Sgt. Pepper when it came out. My older brother and I each had record players, but one copy of the record between us. We would sit in each other’s…
Finding My Audience
When my latest book come out last month, I booked a romance blog tour. My promoter did a great job and got my book featured on about 40 blogs. About halfway into the tour, as I was thanking hosts and seeing no other comments—none—I realized I was wasting my money. The blogs were all focused…
Cast Your Book
Writing can often become labor-intensive. We become so focused on rewrites and editing and tightening up the grammar and narrative and plotting and on and on and on… Sometimes it’s fun, for a break, to remind yourself why you’re writing this thing – at it’s most basic, because it’s fun to tell stories. One of…