Montana Women Writers Meeting

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

Writing and The Fun Scale

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

The Kill Zone Blog Wins Award

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

Five New Year’s Tips to Overcome Butt-in-Chair Syndrome

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

IT’S 10 P.M. DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR VILLAIN IS?

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 Despite study, hard work, and persistence, my books remained unpublished.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

Writers meeting writers

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

How To Write A Damn Synopsis

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