Inventing Reality Editing Service

The difference between Accent vs. Ascent vs. Assent

Similar spellings, comparable and even identical pronunciations...no wonder there’s confusion among writers about these three words.

Accent usually is a noun that means a distinct style of speaking, as in Laura never could master a Castilian accent when learning Spanish. The word also can be used as a verb for “emphasizing a specific feature,” such as Your earrings nicely accent your dress color.

Ascent means going up, whether literally, as in up a mountain, or figuratively, as in improved social status. To wit, Jill’s ascent to the top of the corporate ladder was quick.

Assent has to do with agreement. It can be a noun that means someone agrees or concurs, as in Before buying a sports car, he would need his wife’s assent, or it can be a verb that means to express agreement, as in The boss cheerfully assented to our public relations proposal.

Hopefully the knowledge you’ve gained from this article with nicely accent your writing talents and you being your ascent to the top of the publishing world...if readers give their assent for you to do so.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

5 Writing Prompts for SciFi Writers

Science fiction stories typically arise from a novum, a scientifically plausible concept that is a “reality” in the tale. The novum might be an mechanical device like robot servants, artificial intelligence, or faster-than-light spacecraft; it also can be a hypothetical idea such as “The Earth is a scientific experiment run by aliens to determine the meaning of life” or “The government outlaws books.” The author then asks “What if?” exploring how the world with this novum is different than ours.

Among the problems of many novice science fiction writers is instead of introducing a new novum they rely on used furniture – that is, they borrow novums from popular SF series. After all, how many novels have you read that use starships exploring the galaxy for the Earth-based Federation? Barely changing names to appear as if you are not appropriating – a starcraft seeking M-class worlds for the Earth-centered Alliance – still doesn’t cut it as original or fully using the potential that science fiction offers to examine our culture or humanity.

To help SF writers, here are some novums of potential near-future inventions from which stories could be built:

Diamond batteries
What if nuclear waste were placed in artificial diamonds that convert radiation into electricity? How does this new power source alter society?

Genetronics
What if self-assembling microelectronics, made from genetic material, lead to DNA-based supercomputers smaller than a laptop? How does this change our electronics devices and hence our culture?

Holographic pets
What if AI-based holographs were programmed to be pets? How would this alter people’s perception of reality?

70 Ophiuchi AB colonization
What if habitable planets circled both stars of this binary star system and were the sites of human colonization effort? What challenges would they face in planets orbiting K-type stars?

Super-antivirals
What if broad-spectrum antivirals, based on the ISG15 mutation and other genetic therapies, become widely available? How does the lack of influenza, HIV, herpes and hepatitis in society change our perspectives on those diseases and people who suffer from them?

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

3 Tips on Outlining Your Story

• An outline is the gas that my creativity needs to drive down the writing road.
• Why you can't get your outline into words
• Outline your scene when stuck on what to write
• BONUS: "If you do enough planning before you start to write, there's no way you can have writer's block." 

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

5 Great Quotations about the Power of Writing

“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.” - Anne Carson

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.” - William H. Gass

“No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.” - Isaac Babel

“Words save our lives, sometimes.” - Neil Gaiman

“Written words can also sing.” - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Self-doubt about your talent? Has creative writing lost its joy? With Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers, you can reclaim the pleasure of writing and pen the book you’ve always dreamed of. Respected and award-winning editor Rob Bignell offers uplifting, meaningful phrases that can be read out loud or internalized weekly over the course of a year. Writing prompts and tips follow each affirmation, giving you the inspiration and motivation to keep writing. When you’ve completed this book, you’ll be able to say “I am a writer” with confidence!

Best social media sites for authors to use

Note: This page was updated December 2018.

You want to use social media, as it’s the best way to market directly to prospective buyers of your books. But with the dozens of social media sites out there, which one or two are best for you?

Which social media platform(s) you use largely depends upon three factors:
• If your target audience is there
• If the platform lends itself to the way you promote your book
• If you get results from posting there

As an example, my writing guidebooks do quite well on Twitter, Google+ (during its heyday) and LinkedIn but don’t net much off of Facebook, Pinterest or Tumblr. I don’t get many followers on Facebook, and promos for my writing tips blog don’t lend themselves well to picture-oriented platforms like Pinterest and Tumblr. In contrast, my hiking trail guidebooks do quite well on Twitter, Google+ (again, during its heyday) and Pinterest, all of which can show scenic pictures from the trail. As with my writing guidebooks, not many people follow my hiking guides on Facebook and the recreational activity doesn’t fit the professional nature of LinkedIn.

So, you’ll need to test each platform to see what works best for your books. To get started, here are the major social media platforms that you should consider trying out.

Twitter
With more than 313 million visitors every month (for this and all further quoted numbers, as of January 2017), Twitter offers an excellent opportunity to build a large base of followers. To get more follows, use hashtags, retweet other tweets, and follow others. Building a base of followers takes time, but once you reach 10,000 followers, it tends to take off on its own.

Facebook
With 2.07 billion monthly visitors as of spring 2017, Facebook allows for excellent targeting of prospective customers if you are willing to enter the ad arena. It’s not so great for just making posts, unless you can develop a solid base of followers who regularly check your page.

YouTube
YouTube receives 1 billion monthly visitors and is the second largest search engine in the world – yes, that’s right, an incredible number of people go right to YouTube to see if there is a video on the topic they want to know about. Because of this, on other search engines YouTube videos usually appear high in search results.

LinkedIn
Popular among professionals, LinkedIn is a great way to connect to others looking for consulting and coaching. It’s also an excellent way to develop a relationship; given this, the platform is less effective for selling books than it is for selling services related to your book (which in turn leads to book sales!).

Instagram
The most popular of the photo-sharing platforms with 600 million monthly visitors, it is an great platform for posting photos of you at any events. Unlike other platforms, where hashtags either are not used (LinkedIn) or frowned upon if more than three are given (Facebook, Twitter), most Instagram posts contain any number of the metadata tags.

Pinterest
The photo-sharing sight is excellent for posting pictures of your book covers and other products (be sure to include links to the pages where they are sold). Because tagged items in Pinterest can go viral rapidly and show up high on search engines, you really can significantly boost your sales. Pinterest boasts 150 million monthly visitors.

Tumblr
With more than 420 million users and 113 million posts per day, this photo-sharing sight can be used the same way as Pinterest. Tagged items tend to appear high on search engines.

Google+
Unfortunately, Google announced it will shut down this social media site in April 2019. There's little reason to build your audience on it anymore, but if you already have a large audience there, keep using it until your followers migrate to your other social media sites.

A word of caution: Of course, not all of those monthly visitors are interested in the topic of your book or even in reading. Generally, the more visitors, however, the greater the number of them will be interested in your book’s genre or topic.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

How to use styles when formatting your book

Changing fonts and sizes of lettering in your manuscript can make navigating it easier for readers. Chapter and section heads, for example, often are boldface and use larger lettering than the main text, as this indicates shifts in topics. The size and typeface of any text is called a style, and several of them likely are used in a manuscript, such as one for the main text, another for the chapter title, and yet another for the subheads.

The challenge to writers when formatting their manuscript is consistency in the use of their styles. If a chapter section’s heading is font size 16, even just a subtle shift to font size 15 in the next section heading can look strange to readers and lead them to wonder if they’re about to read a subsection rather than a new section. That can result in confusion about about how ideas in your manuscript are related.

Simply put, consistency in the use of styles leads to a reader-friendly experience and a professional appearance.

Remembering the specifics of each item (such as if a chapter title is font size 14 or if a subhead font size 12 in italics) can be difficult. Fortunately, you can automate them in MS Word by using the styles function. A style in MS Word is a set of formatting instructions so that whenever you want text to be a subhead, selecting that pre-set style will give you a same point size, font style, and alignment, ensuring consistency.

MS Word comes with several built-in styles, typically shown on the right side of Home ribbon. You also can create your own styles, which I recommend if you’re formatting an ebook. The built-in styles often do not lend to a professional appearance as they are forced to fit your manuscript’s needs.

When creating a style, before even setting them up on MS Word write a list of how each one should look. When making this list, you want to write styles for at least the following items:
• Chapter title
• Section headers within a chapter
• Subheads within sections
• Main (or body) text
• Captions
To this list you might add drop caps, sidebar headers, sidebar text, sidebar source, footnotes, left page folio, and right page folio.

Next, for each of those items, you want to determine the following:
• Font
• Font size
• Bold, italics or regular type
• Align left, centered, align right or justified

Keep the formula simple. For example, every style ought to be single spaced with 1.15 line spacing and no automated added spaces before or after the text. With the exception of the captions, all the items should be in the same font.

So your styles might be:
• Chapter title
   > Cambria
   > Font size 30
   > Bold
   > Centered
• Section headers within a chapter
   > Cambria
   > Font size 15
   > Bold
   > Align left
• Subheads within sections
   > Cambria
   > Font size 11.5
   > Italics
   > Align left
• Main text
   > Cambria
   > Font size 11.5
   > Regular type
   > Justified
• Captions
   > Calibri
   > Font size 11.5
   > Regular type
   > Justified

Once you’ve got a list of your styles, on the Home ribbon tap the arrow in the lower right hand side of the Styles section. A drop-down menu will appear. Click the square icon in the menu’s lower left corner. A pop-up screen will appear that allows you to enter all the elements of the style you wish to create. Do so using your notes. When done, click OK in the pop-up screen’s lower right corner.

The style you’ve just created will appear at the left side of the Styles section on the Home ribbon. Whenever you want to use that style, simply highlight the words you wish to change and click that style in the Home ribbon. The highlighted text will change to the styles you’ve set.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Client’s novel follows crash survivor’s journey

A recent editing client has published her first novel. Kathi Mims’ “Brace for Impact” tells the story of a passenger on the famous US Airways Flight 1549, which Captain Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger ditched on the frigid Hudson River after a goose flew into a plane engine on Jan. 15, 2009. Following the rescue, the passenger sitting in the window of the exit row – Peter – connects with airline agent Mary Jo, as she guides him through the survival process. Driving from New Jersey to Charlotte, the two strangers connect in a bond of friendship and reflection, as they weave through the obstacles and repercussions from an event that no one could have predicted. The novel is available on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, and at Mims’ website.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

5 Science Fiction Novum Writing Prompts

Science fiction stories typically arise from a novum, a scientifically plausible concept that is a “reality” in the tale. The novum might be an mechanical device like robot servants, artificial intelligence, or faster-than-light spacecraft; it also can be a hypothetical idea such as “The Earth is a scientific experiment run by aliens to determine the meaning of life” or “The government outlaws books.” The author then asks “What if?” exploring how the world with this novum is different than ours.

Among the problems of many novice science fiction writers is instead of introducing a new novum they rely on used furniture – that is, they borrow novums from popular SF series. After all, how many novels have you read that use starships exploring the galaxy for the Earth-based Federation? Barely changing names to appear as if you are not appropriating – a starcraft seeking M-class worlds for the Earth-centered Alliance – still doesn’t cut it as original or fully using the potential that science fiction offers to examine our culture or humanity.

To help SF writers, here are some novums of potential near-future inventions from which stories could be built:

Carbon-breathing batteries
What if electrochemical cells sucked in CO2 to generate power for our many electronic devices or lithium-air batteries that utilize oxygen to generate power? How will this affect the popularity of electric cars?

Designer antibiotics
What if we developed drugs to destroy very specific forms of bacteria rather than use drugs hitting a wide-swath of microbes (which happens to cause bacteria not being targeted to evolve into superbugs)? Will this stop superbugs or bacteriological weapons from working?

40 Eridani A expedition
What if we found a planet orbiting this star in its habitable zone? An expedition to a terrestrial planet around this star might conduct studies to determine of there is a geological record of the red giant winds from 40 Eridani C before it became a white dwarf; ice ages due to the dusty space caused by Star C's red giant phase is one possibility.

Malapert Mountain South Pole Multi-Spectral Observatory
What if at the bottom of the moon we installed a 100m spinning ionic liquid mirror telescope so that we could see the surface of extrasolar planets? How do the discoveries made by the observatory alter human perceptions about our place in the universe?

Volcano mining
What if we are able to mine previous metals and minerals from ocean volcanos, which are rich with such resources? How could this be made economically feasible?

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

9 Must-Know Tips for Plotting a Story

• What is a story? An autopsy of a tale
• Your story isn’t its plot or structure
• Narrative structure: One step ahead or two back? 
• Which is best: Character- or plot-driven stories?
• What is a ‘cookie cutter’ story? 
• Think of plot as set-up, build-up, pay-off 
• Start your story in middle to increase suspense
• Don’t end novel with cliffhanger 
• Utilize both internal and external conflicts 
• BONUS: “Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.” - David Mitchell 

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.