Book reviews are incredibly important to authors. They give a sense of legitimacy, serve as free advertising, guide other readers to their works, and give them a better chance to have their story visible on certain book seller sites. Storm Chaser, for instance, had 28 ratings and 15 written reviews on Goodreads.

But since being re-released, Storm ( Read more... )

 I want to apologize again for how slow I've been with the Haunted Noble County, Indiana  project. I've collected most of the photos and written half the manuscript, but haven't been getting back to people about their individual tales as I should ( Read more... )

 It's a rough time to find things to be thankful for. Oh, they're there: family, health ... okay, family. But our society today is geared toward stressing the bad, and taking the good for granted. It's human nature to complain; most of us do it. Right now, someone is complaining because I just used a semicolon. But I have a wife who gets me, grand- ( Read more... )

Yes, I've won National Novel Writing Month! 50,000 words of a novel over, in my case, 25 days.
What's my reward? Well, bragging rights. Also, I get a novel out of it, and
that's no small thing. 99% of all people who attempt to write a novel
agree it's horribly difficult to get it finished. The other 1% are
friggin' freaks of nature.


( Read more... )

You won't hear much from me in November, although my regular blogs will continue with stuff already written and saved. Why? I've decided to once again compete in National Novel Writing Month, with the intention of losing ( Read more... )

Now that I've finished the final draft of my new novel and handed it over to Emily to edit, I had to go back and figure out why I started working on it in the first place.

Ordinarily, when I finish writing a novel I like to have it finished--as good and polished as I can get it, before I move on to a new project. I also want to have it in ( Read more... )

Writing instructors, editors, publishers, they all say the same thing: When writing a piece of fiction, start at the beginning; go to the end; then stop.

Don't pad it. Don't be too sparse. Just make your story as long as it needs to be, no longer. It's good advice.

It's also wrong.


( Read more... )

 If I'm counting correctly (which is never a given), this is my sixth year judging 4H prose writing entries. And to think, before that I used to think all 4H kids did was push animals around.

Truth is, 4H'ers do a lot more than working with farm animals, which is probably what the average person thinks of. It's too bad they don't get more ( Read more... )

As part of submitting to agents and publishers, an author often has to write a brief synopsis of their novel. It's no big deal: Just boil your 80,000 word work of art into a 500 word ...

Okay, it is a big deal.

The actual length of a synopsis depends on who's asking, which is why I usually do three: a long one that's basically an outline, a ( Read more... )

 The final draft of The Source Emerald is done!

Wait, let me start over:

The "final draft" of The Source Emerald is done! (Assuming that will continue to be the title.)

There, more accurate. The Source Emerald is about a young FBI agent who is assigned to track down possible gem smugglers, only to discover two of her suspects claim to be foreigners ( Read more... )