Point of View

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POINT OF VIEW: Writing Is My Escape From Pandemic World

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space portal - deposit photos

As I write this, I am sitting in the parking lot at the grocery store waiting for our weekly grocery curbside pick-up. It struck me, driving over here, how small my world has become since the pandemic began. Once a week I leave home to go to the post office, then to the grocery store, and then back home again. Every four weeks, I plug in the Prius to charge up for the next month. I’ve been doing this now for more than six months, and only on a couple occasions have I gone farther than this two-mile radius from … Read more

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Point of View: Waiting for #100

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100

100 is a magic number for authors. There’s an old saying – let’s call it the “Rule of 100” – that you’ll get 100 rejections before you make your first sale. I had maybe twenty, so it’s certainly not a hard and fast rule. But it does give aspiring authors a reason to keep going – what if that golden ticket is just around the corner, and you gave up at 99? They say something similar about trying to get an agent. Agents are the gatekeepers of the mainstream publishing industry – it’s nearly impossible to get noticed by the … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Upping the Odds

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gambling - deposit photos

Some writers seem to have an innate sense of the publishing marketplace, surfing adroitly from one trend to another, catching every wave and riding it to success.  The rest of us aren’t so lucky. I’ve been writing seriously for six years now, and I can’t lay claim to catching a single trend. Trends are, by nature, often short and ephemeral – so unless you can turn around a book in ninety days (and some writers can and do) they are notoriously hard to catch. My first book took me five years to write. I did my second book in thirty … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Making Mistakes

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Fail / Mistake

Mistakes. We all make them. Yesterday I’d uploaded some changes and corrections for “The Stark Divide.” They were minor corrections – a missing quote, a grammatical error – things a reader had caught and been kind enough to pass along to me. This morning I woke up to the email from Amazon confirming that my changes were live – for “The Rising Tide.” Panicked, I logged into the KDP dashboard and opened the book info for “The Rising Tide.” Sure enough, I had switched the insides over to the text for “The Stark Divide.” These things suck and make me … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Writing Too Fast

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speed - pixabay

Is there such a thing as writing too fast? That occurred to me this week as I really hit my stride on my latest novel, “Twin Moons Rising.“ I am zooming through this one, which feels great, especially since I hope to submit it for Pitch Wars next month. I’ve been writing an average of 1000 words a day these last couple of months, but lately I’ve been reaching as high as 2000 – NaNoWriMo levels of writing output. In June, I shifted my writing time to first thing in the morning. I usually get up at about 5:30 AM … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Writing Without a Win

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Waiting room - deposit photos

It’s been 7,464 hours since my last sale. Not that I’m counting. Honestly, it’s partly my own fault. In October last year fell into a bit of a … let’s call it a rough patch, since we’re not dealing with clinical depression here, and I don’t want to minimize those who suffer from it. Still, I basically stopped writing for months. I’d just finished and published the last of my two trilogies, and had wrapped up a novel, submitted it to Pitch Wars, and then utterly failed to even attract a full manuscript request. Since then, I’ve thrown myself into … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: The Art of Self-Reinvention

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Transformation / Reinvention

I’m in the midst of a transition as a writer, the likes of which I have never attempted before, and TBH, it scares the crap out of me. I came into publishinh via MM romance. It wasn’t my first love – I’ve always been a huge sci fi freak, since I was a little kid – but the door was open, and I walked through it. I don’t regret that decision – it brought me some amazing friends, a great community of writers and readers, and even some book sales along the way. But my heart was always in sci … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Put a Wolf Under the Table

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wolf snarl - deposit photo

Your characters are on a quest for the fabled Sword of Bighands. They’re sitting around a thick iron-banded wooden table at the Borderlands Pub, a dark, seedy local hangout where you can buy anything from drugs to human slaves. Or a really good guide to get you out of Bordertown and across the great Scorched Desert, to the fabled Treasure Lands across that hot, dry, shimmering expanse of red sand. Your characters are talking about the long trek ahead, sharing war stories, and sipping on curiously ice-cold mead. And they’re absolutely bored out of their gourds. So what can you … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Keeping a Series Bible

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Series Bible

Fiction authors have a lot of things to keep track of in their books- – character descriptions, locations, plot details, and all the other things that go into constructing a world. It’s a complicated business, building an entire world. But what about when you want to write a series? When you’re working on a single story, the details are still (fairly) fresh in your mind, and it’s easy enough to flip back and forth through the text (or to use the search function) to find what you need. But writing a series multiplies the details you have to keep track … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: The Best Oreos

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oreos - deposit photos

Every writer has their vice. For some it’s the siren call of alcohol – a nightcap before bed to help drown out the muse’s voice, or a cold beer in the afternoon after a hard couple hard hours wrestling with plot bunnies and squirrels. Hey, anyone know the difference? I could never figure it out. For others, it’s the terrible lure of social media, a great place to avoid, you know, actually having to write something, while feeling good about yourself for posting all those fantastic writing memes to your Instagram account, Twitter feed, or Facebook page. For me, it’s … Read more