The first time I considered presenting at a writers conference, I immediately thought, “But I don’t know enough to teach anything.” Turns out, just about everyone who has been writing for a while knows something. Perhaps, like me, you’ve done a lot of research and figured out how to ferret out information in places besides “Google”…
Category: General Interest
Journal your way to rich settings
The wedding excitement of September 7th has subsided. We enjoyed a loving and entertaining weekend, and my daughter Jalena was the most beautiful bride in the world. Euphoric, I rode a hot air balloon of happiness over a sunny, Rockwellian world where all the men were handsomely dressed. The women were beautiful, their hair perfect,…
Genre by any other name…
Hi, my name is Cindy Skaggs, and I write genre fiction. As ridiculous as it appears to readers, this kind of genre-as-vice mentality is an ongoing battle. Having worked in a large public library system while I finished my education, I know for a fact that librarians don’t care where something is shelved except as…
How and Why I Mastered Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a foreign language to most authors. The goal of SEO is for your audience to easily find you by searching your name or your book title. Most people never search past the first page of results given by the search engine. So, you must optimize your search-ability within these…
Increased procrastination or increased motivation? That depends on you.
Have you ever been searching for that something special for one of your characters, a subplot, a setting, a way to kill off a character, or perhaps researching for a historical fiction manuscript and it happens? You click. You have no self-control—you simply click! For example: Xkcd’s Radiation Dose Chart – PA: 88. LRD: 988….