1st Draft Fiction

I have this little 140 page document I want to print, so I finally decided to set up my “print server”, a Dell PC running Windows Vista with a HP 6400 all-in-one and a Dell laser printer connected. I spent the morning vacuuming the grills and trying to find cables to connect everything. I’m using my TV as the monitor (I can almost read it without my glasses!) and everything is stuffed into my…

Content is King: How to Take It to the Next Level

The article 5 Secrets to Take Your Content to the Next Level at Inc.com reminds us that Content is King and offers five suggestions to help amplify your content and move your website higher in search engine rankings. As a writer I’m most in favor of their first tip — Tell a Story:

One way to amplify your content is to tell a story that engages readers. Content is designed to start a conversation…

Embedding Tweets in Your Posts

I realize I haven’t posted anything here for a while. Part of this is due to NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, which is a contest that occurs every November. Participants attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in the thirty days of the month. Quality isn’t important, only the number of words, yet it’s still difficult to do. This was my fourth attempt, and the first time I successfully…

RocNaNo First Friday #NaNoWriMo Write-in

Photo copyright Writers and Books. Used with permission.

I had a ball last night, when about twenty members of RocNaNo, the Rochester, NY region of NaNoWriMo, gathered at Writers & Books for a write-in. It’s only seven days into November and already our region has written nearly 2.5 million words as part of National Novel Writing Month. Way to go us!

As expected there was lots of chatter about…

RocNaNo #NaNoWriMo 2014 Kickoff

Last night’s RocNaNo write-in was a truly interesting experience. I don’t know if it was the amount of pre-planning, the tuna melt I ate just before starting, or the fact that I had my (classical & jazz) tunes cranked way up, but I managed to get an amazing amount of writing done between midnight and 2:00 am. And with less cheating than I’d expected, too. (Cheating is defined as copy-pasting…

My 2014 #NaNoWriMo project: Wandering Wizard

This year’s NaNoWriMo project is titled Wandering Wizard:

James Scott Patton is new to being a wizard, and already he’s made a shambles of things. His best friend died because of his ineptitude, his house was blown up, he’s accumulated a stack of hospital bills, and he’s unemployed.

Again.

Who would want to hire a novice wizard, even one who’s broke and desperate? Especially one who already has…

NaNoWriMo 2014 - How I'm doing things differently on my blog this time around.

NaNoWriMo will soon be upon us, and once again I will be trying to blog my progress here. This time, however, instead of posting sections of the work in progress I’m just going to be posting “status reports” about my progress. There are two reasons for this:

So that, should I try to sell by book to a commercial publisher, I don’t run into “first to publish” objections, and

So that, in the best…

Exercise: What do you like about your genre?

I’m reading the book Million Dollar Outlines by David Farland right now. Here’s an exercise from the book that looks especially worthwhile:

You probably have a good idea about what you want to write — horror, mainstream, fantasy, historical, romance, westerns, religious fiction, and whatnot. Sit down for ten minutes and list five things that you feel you most like about the fiction that you read.…

Before You Start a New Story - questions to ask yourself #nanowrimo

It’s October, and that means that I’m once again getting ready for NaNoWriMo. For those who don’t know, that’s the National Novel Writing Month, an exercise in insanity that has me attempting to write 50,000 words of a novel in the 30 days of November. That’s 1,667 words a day, with no days off for little things like working or Thanksgiving.

November has always been a busy month for me, so to…

"a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.” Tropic of Cancer

I think I’ve found a line to use the next time I have a septic system failure:

“It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.” — Pennsylvania state Supreme Court justice Michael Musmanno describing Tropic of Cancer

[amazon asin=0802131786&template=iframe image]

Wow! Look at me! I’m now a Certified Hootsuite Professional!

What does this mean? Well, what it really means is that I’ve taken a course and passed a test on using Hootsuite, a popular means for managing social media messages. The tool is very good for Twitter messages, of course (consider the name), but it also connects to Facebook (accounts, pages, and groups), Google+, Pinterest, Flickr,…

[A question came up recently in a discussion group on Facebook about the differences between fixed, fluid, elastic, responsive, and adaptive website design. Here's my response.]

A fixed design is where the layout uses absolute values (usually pixels) for everything. Sites used to be designed for minimum screen widths of 640px, then 1024px, and so on. A common convention today is to set up a grid…