How to Write a Bestselling Novel: In 7 Minutes a Day to Your Bestseller, writers receive expert advice on topics like motivating yourself to write, starting your story with exciting opening lines, creating intriguing characters, mastering the craft of writing to elevate your style, and pitching your story to potential publishers.
“Language is the light of the mind.” - John Stuart Mill
“Words, whether weaved as poetry or prose, can always find space to survive and thrive.” - Harriet Anena
“Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.” - Orson Scott Card
“A word is dead when it’s been said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.” - Emily Dickinson
“I never met a word I didn’t love.” - Gail Carson Levine
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.
Every success story begins with a dream. If you dream of being a professional, published author, that success story requires believing in yourself and in knowing that your efforts will lead to triumph. Read the motivational blog entry this quotation came from by clicking on the quote card.
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.
A recent editing client has published his first crime novel. Seamus Heffernan’s “Napalm Hearts” tells the story of Thaddeus Grayle, a successful but bored American private investigator who has grown weary of snooping after the cheating spouses of his adopted city of London, England. Recently divorced and even more recently sober, he fills what little free time he has with movies, baseball and his own torrid affairs. He wants a change, and it finally arrives thanks to a wealthy businessman desperate to find his hard-partying wife – a young woman who might be in the biggest trouble of her life. Capably aided by his associates – the whip-smart Charlotte “Charlie” Colbourne, and ex-copper Francis Ruddick – Grayle goes all in on the case he’s always wanted, taking him deep into the city's seedy underbelly and face-to-face with an upper class at war with its own vices. “Napalm Hearts” is available online in paperback and ebook.
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.
As an indie author running a business stemming from your books, your home is the perfect place to set up office.
Working out of your home offers a number of benefits. First, it helps you maintain a low capital investment up front. You have no rent and no utilities that you aren’t already paying. In fact, you probably can save on taxes, as a home office often is tax deductible. In addition, working from home means no morning or evening commute, increasing the amount of time you have available to work. Further, you have the flexibility of setting your own hours, as you’re not keeping a storefront of sorts (though at times you will have to work when others are available to discuss business with you). Lastly, working from home allows you to maintain a healthier lifestyle. You can better control your diet when not confronted with birthday cakes for coworkers and donut Fridays, and you also can get up and stretch and even hit the treadmill for short spurts throughout the day, something that would be frowned upon at most workplaces.
As great as working out of your home sounds, before converting your den or that extra bedroom into an office explore if you actually will be able to do so. Local zoning laws often prohibit certain kinds of businesses, especially those that generate a lot of vehicle traffic, from operating out of a home. There also may be deed or rental agreement restrictions. For most authors turned coach/consultant, neither probably will be an obstacle to running your business out of your home, though.
In truth, the real obstacle may be you – you may not be able to personally handle working from home where chores and a hundred other activities can divert you from your business, where the neighbor’s dog barks throughout the day, where on a perfect warm blue sky day you can’t resist the temptation to chuck it all and head to the beach. When working from home, you always must maintain a line between personal and work lives rather than allow them to blur. The solution is to still set up a home office but work in public at coffeeshops, cafes and libraries.
If you decide to work out of your home, the next step is setting up the office space for yourself. We’ll discuss that in an upcoming entry.
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.
Do you find yourself going crazy over these two spellings? Well, get ahold of yourself and read on.
A hold as two words typically is a phrase in which hold means something is being held. For example, you might write She’s really got a hold on me or Jerry has put a hold on any more shipments of that defective product.
Ahold as one word usually is accompanied by the verb get and the preposition of; to wit, Darling, get ahold of yourself! It also can mean “grasp” as in He grabbed ahold of my wrist.
And with that explanation, you now should have a hold on the distinction between these two spellings.
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.
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:
Facial recognition app
What if smart contact lenses we wore include a facial recognition app that instantly told you the name of any person before you as well as provided a profile about them? How does this change our greeting customs?
Garden sensors
What if sensors beneath your lawn or in your garden could measure the amount of moisture in the soil and detect bug infestations then deliver targeted sprays of water, pesticides or fertilizer to those spots? How does this change the appearance of our lawns and neighborhoods?
GJ 338 AB colonization
What if future space explorers decided to settle a habitable planet orbited the second star in this binary? Such a planet probably would orbit the K-type star in just 34.5 days.
Living perfumes
What if people could download and apply bioengineered bacteria that when applied to the skin would emit a pleasant scent? The body’s epidermal area would become a living ecosystem of perfume.
Upcycling
What if products and their packaging were designed so that when recycled they retained 100% of their original integrity? This will be necessary in a resource-stretched world. How does this change the way we package, use and discard consumer goods?
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.
• Passive voice
• Telling not showing
• Weak verbs
• Starting sentences with "it"
• Adverbs everywhere
• BONUS: “Be obscure clearly.” – E.B. White
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.
“A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.” - Charles Peguy
“Literature is the art of using words. This is not a platitude, but a truth of the first importance, a truth so profound that many writers never get down to it...” - Arnold Bennett
“Words empty as the wind are best left unsaid.” - Homer
“If the word doesn’t exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn’t exist.” - Charles Baudelaire
“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” - Stephen King
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.
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.