On Thursday, June 23, 2002, I’ll be presenting a FREE tutorial to Montana Women Writers about Draft2Digital. D2D is an easy program to help you professionally format your books and distribute them “wide” to online booksellers like Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, and international markets. Montana Women Writers will… Continue reading
Master story guru and teacher Larry Brooks graciously invited me to write a guest post for his award-winning blog. Thank you, Larry, for this opportunity to visit with Storyfix.com readers. If you’ve ever despaired about your writing, you’re not alone. Here’s the link to my post about The Fun Scale… Continue reading
For fans and writers of the mystery/suspense/thriller genre, The Kill Zone is a terrific online hangout. Eleven bestselling authors rotate daily posts. The archives add up to a master course in crime writing. You never know what surprises you’ll find at TKZ. Sue Coletta described allowing herself to be sealed in… Continue reading
The writer’s job is to plunk our butts in chairs and produce words day in, day out. As a result, posture suffers, eyes blur, brains fog, carpals cramp, and rear ends keep getting wider. In extreme cases, Butt-in-Chair Syndrome leads to the dreaded Dead Butt Syndrome (you can’t make this… Continue reading
For years, my mystery novels won contests and attention from agents and editors…and rave rejections. Despite study, hard work, and persistence, my books remained unpublished. A key element was missing. But what? Several years ago I started following The Kill Zone blog about the same time I began a new novel titled… Continue reading
We might as well confess. As writers, we’ve been known to eavesdrop on conversations. We wonder, what is that couple at the next table squabbling about? Or we listen over the dressing room partition to young women anticipating their lovers’ reactions to lingerie they’re trying on. Or we’re stuck… Continue reading
The saying goes, everyone has a book inside them. Here’s your chance to get it out of imagination and down on paper because November is National Novel Writing Month. Last year’s NaNoWriMo included 431,626 participants in 633 different regions on six continents. Of these, more than 40,000 met the goal of writing… Continue reading
There are writers and there are civilians (AKA normal people). Civilians look at us fiction writers as objects of curiosity…a little odd, but probably not dangerous. They don’t understand how we can happily spend hours chasing imaginary people around in our imaginations. Come to think of it, that does sound… Continue reading
Recently, I became the victim of an attempted sexual assault in broad daylight. An assailant stuck a gun in my back, dragged me into a dark, deserted barn on the county fairgrounds, and tried to rape me. When he put down the gun as he tried to tear my clothes… Continue reading
With election season upon us, I conducted a completely unscientific poll geared toward writers. The question: “Would you rather write a synopsis or undergo an IRS audit?” The results: 64% of authors chose the audit, 32% were undecided, and 4% of write-in votes said they rather pump out a septic… Continue reading
