Authors, do you use editors? Proofreaders? I have a guilty secret… #amwriting #amediting

October 24, 2017October 24, 2017 / Deborah Jay / Debby Lush / 54 Comments

I published this little confession on my own blog (https://deborahjayauthor.com/) last week, and it garnered so many interesting points of view, I thought I’d bring it over here too…

Since I joined the Indie publishing scene back in 2013, I have read SO many times the

advice, nay, instruction, ‘thou shalt not publish without having your work professionally edited/proof read/beta read’.

But I have a guilty secret…

I don’t use editors or proof readers.

Gasp! Isn’t my work trash?
Well, apparently not, if my reviews are to be believed. Here is a snippet from a recent review, from an Amazon Vine Reviewer, no less:

“This is a good, entertaining read with lots of originality. And THANK YOU to the author for the lack of errors and grammar that mar so many books these days!”

Okay, I admit to working with a writer’s group. They get to see my first draft and pick up on any obvious procedural errors (like the 36 hour day I once managed to write in), and suggest ways of strengthening the plot.
Then I finish the novel and have 2, or at most 3 beta readers. Only if they all say the same thing about any part of the book do I make any changes.

And after carrying this guilty secret with me for years now, I was hugely relieved to read this post from well known author Dean Wesley Smith:
https://www.deanwesleysmith.com/killing-the-sacred-cows-of-publishing-beta-readers-help-you/

This makes me feel SO much better about my writing. It’s how I began, how I’ve continued, and how I intend to continue.
I DO think editors etc. are an excellent idea for writers at an early stage of their careers, when they still have much to learn, but I’ve been doing this job professionally (writing non-fiction for magazines and books) for decades, and while I’m always learning more, I have a fair bit of confidence in my own ability to tell a tale, and tell it in reasonable English. If I break a grammar rule, I (probably) meant to!

How about you writers? Is there anyone else out there who shares my guilty secret. I know a small handful of other. Are there any more?

Review – THE EMISSARY by Marcia Meara #fantasy #paranormal novella #angels

October 23, 2017 / Marcia Meara / 11 Comments

So excited to find Deborah Jay’s lovely review of The Emissary awaiting me this morning. It made my day to read her comments, and I’m hoping you guys will check it out, too, and share all over creation! With no time to market this one (so far), your help getting the word out would mean the world to me. Thanks, and my heartfelt thanks to Debby, too! ❤

deborahjay

Just a quick post today – I am winding up my annual holiday so I’m exhausted! Now I need a holiday to recover…

So a quickie review. My friend Marcia has gone a little further off the beaten track than she usually does, and ventured further into a delightful paranormal story, a novella spin off from her Riverbend series.

Blurb

An angel’s work is never done—that’s part of the gig. But angels hadn’t been created to deal with such a vastly over-populated planet, rife with misery, suffering, and general chaos. Helping souls in peril has become a nearly impossible job, and even angelic tempers are frayed.

The archangel Azrael has had enough. He believes he’s found a way to ease their burden while saving jeopardized humans, too—hired help.

When Jake Daughtry lost his life rescuing a total stranger from certain death, he was on the fast track to Heaven. But…

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#MondayMeme #MondayBlogs

October 23, 2017 / Marcia Meara / 14 Comments

In the hopes that this week is a turning point in the journey toward a normal routine once more, I’m taking the first step with #MondayMeme. Here are a few to make your think, or smile, or both. Enjoy!
😀

And one more, because I SO identify with Lisa!

How to Embed Tweets in Your Blog Post

October 22, 2017 / Marcia Meara / 14 Comments

I’ve wondered about this very thing, and now I get it. Check out Sarah’s post on how to embed a tweet in your WordPress blog, and then, click the link to another of her posts about why you’d want to. Majorly cool info here, and I’m definitely going to give this a try! (Don’t forget to share!)

Lemon Shark

Tweets aren’t just for Twitter anymore.

Here’s a neat thing you can do with those tweets right here on your WordPress blog. It’s wicked cool. And easy. 3 steps…done.

All of you lovely bloggers know I’m not a techie but I wanted to share this fun find with you.

I have visuals, too, which is awesome. Admittedly, I went a bit bonkers with the arrows but…you get the point. (I know. I’m hilarious.)

First we’re going old school with a “cut and paste” URL option, then we’ll embed an html code like we know what we’re doing.

No need to hurt your eyes squinting at the screenshots—you can click to enlarge them. Let’s get tweeting on our blogs.

Copy Link Option:

STEP ONE:

Choose the tweet you want. Click on the cute, little grey v-shaped thingy in the top, right corner.

Click to enlarge

STEP TWO:

You’ll see a drop-down…

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Sally’s Cafe and Bookstore – Author Update – Sacha Black, Marcia Meara and M.J. Mallon

October 16, 2017 / Marcia Meara / Leave a comment

What a great way to start my day! Check out Sally’s Café and Bookstore blog today, where The Emissary is featured along with the latest by two other great writers, Sacha Black, and M. J. Mallon! Very good company, indeed. Don’t forget to pass it along, please. All three of us will be very grateful! 🙂

The Gift That Keeps on Giving – #HurricaneIrma

October 14, 2017October 14, 2017 / Marcia Meara / 65 Comments

In case you’ve been wondering why I’m still not back to blog business as usual, five weeks after Irma’s dastardly sweep through the islands and Florida, it’s because my life is still upside down. The good news is, progress is being made. Slowly, but still. ANY progress is a good thing. That’s my story, an’ I’m stickin’ to it!

For those who are curious about what happens when a gargantuan tree falls on your garage, smashes through your roof and attic, and lands on your vehicles, here’s the latest installment. You’ll have to scroll back a few posts to see the pictures from the earlier stages, of course, but this week’s phase dealt with cleaning out every single item in the garage and attic. It was dangerous, back-breaking work, so of course, you call in the strongest clean-up crew you can find. Ta-da!

I will say, I was surprised when I met our contractor’s clean up crew, but they were a force to be reckoned with! Unstoppable for two full days of dirty work in 90 degree heat, they jumped right in. Even when the garage door was taken apart, revealing this, they didn’t hesitate:

Mark stayed home to help direct, since determining which things were junk and which weren’t is an art form only HE has mastered. This is about the halfway point, with all wall shelves on the left already removed, and much of the attic stuff taken down.

These ladies not only carried a ton of stuff out of that mess, they cleaned every salvageable piece before packing into the big, carefully labeled boxes. (Did I mention they were awesome?)

Then, they started stacking things in the 20’x10′ pod, from the back, all the way to the front, top to bottom, until not another thing would fit!

Keep in mind that every trip into that garage was risky. Note the large box hanging down through the broken rafters. Those continued to slide down and fall through from the night of the hurricane until the last one was retrieved. Some of the boxes contained Christmas decorations, and were relatively light. Some, like this one, contained auto parts, and were not!

Shovels and wheelbarrows were employed, as well as brooms, and brute strength.

Progress WAS made! (After two long days!)

And eventually, the garage was emptied.

What wasn’t salvageable ended up in my new front lawn ornament, a 16’x8′ construction dumpster, which, I might add, is full. It will have to be emptied before demo and repairs even begin.

Yes! Both the 20′ long pod and the 16′ long dumpster are full. Of things that were once in this garage! Do not ask me how they all got squeezed in there. I’m only responsible for the Christmas items in the attic. The rest were all Mark’s. I swear it. But I also swear that all that stuff isn’t going back! Nope. We will be adding a new shed or other storage container in the backyard, way over in the north forty, where it will never fall on anyone again. Probably.

Next step? Demolition of roof and rafters, and portions of the concrete block walls. Stuff has to come down before it can be rebuilt.

Meanwhile, rain pours straight through the torn up tarp, but there’s no longer anything in the garage it can damage. And the yellow tape now replaces the trashed garage door, since there’s nothing left to steal. And besides, what Irma did here (and so many other places) is a CRIME if I ever saw one!

Next on my mind–how I’m going to decorate the pod and the dumpster for the holidays. I’m thinking paint the pod red and put our yard reindeer in front of it, and voila. Santa’s Very Big Sleigh! But the dumpster is more problematic. Perhaps I should just string lights all over it? 😀 😀 😀

Ya gotta keep on laughing, you know. Otherwise, you might as well just give up and quit. 😉

Guest author: Marcia Meara – The Emissary… a new Riverbend book!

October 12, 2017 / Marcia Meara / 11 Comments

So pleased to be featured on Sue Vincent’s lovely Daily Echo blog today! Thanks to Sue for her tireless work in promoting writing in so many ways! Please stop by and take a look, and if you have time, share with the immediate world! I’d appreciate it hugely! 🙂 ❤ And while you're there, browse through some of the wonderful posts, poetry, and photography on Sue's blog. It's a great place to hangout!

Sue Vincent's Daily Echo

My thanks to Sue for letting me share the news of my newest book today. It’s a real pleasure to be here!

It’s always gratifying to discover readers are interested in the lives of secondary characters as well as those of the “stars” of my stories. After I published my second Riverbend novel, Finding Hunter, I began receiving a lot of questions about Gabe Angelino, the trucker who brought Hunter home. It appears Willow wasn’t the only one who thought he might be a real angel instead of just a good man. Even after I published book three, That Darkest Place, the interest in Gabe was still widespread. At every local event—book signings, eco tours, slide show presentations—someone invariably asks about that mysterious trucker.

Talk about writing on the wall! This message was written large enough that even someone with eyes as old as mine could read it…

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Writing about a location – Do you have to go there?

October 6, 2017 / Marcia Meara / 4 Comments

An excellent post from Don Massenzio on researching the setting of your book. You should check it out!

Don Massenzio's Author Site

One of the most important aspects of your writing is the setting. You want to accomplish a couple of things when you write about a particular place. First, you want to give your reader a sense of the place you are writing about in a descriptive way that transports them there. There are books I have read that have made me feel that I was experiencing the place even if I hadn’t been there. One of my favorites, To Kill a Mockingbird, made me feel the humidity of Alabama. The Shining gave me a chill through Stephen King’s description of the unrelenting winter around the Overlook Hotel.

There are authors that excel at describing their surroundings. Dean Koontz is especially astute at describing indigenous vegetation in California, where many of his books are set. In his Odd Thomas series, the fictional California desert town of Pico Mundo comes to life…

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Writers, have you discovered the Pomodoro technique? #amwriting #timemanagement

October 2, 2017 / Deborah Jay / Debby Lush / 41 Comments

Are you a full time writer?

I’m not, so like a lot of others, I have to fit my writing time around my full time business. And my business is VERY full time – I train and judge competition dressage horses at National and International level. It’s a fabulous job, but very time consuming, not to mention sometimes exhausting.

This is me in my day job

When people glibly tell me that there is always time to be found in the work day, I know they have NO idea what my life is like. I can often be on the road by 7am, and not home until 10pm, having been either driving or working the entire time. Please tell me where I am supposed to find time to write in that schedule?

I’m not complaining, no sir, I’m just making a point. Not everybody’s life lends itself to a regular writing routine. Mine certainly doesn’t.

So what is my point?

Well, I recently followed a short writing course, largely because it had a great module on plotting (guess who is trying to learn more about plotting vs pantsing?). But what it also had, was a section on time management.

My first thought was, ‘here we go again, I’ve heard it all before’.

But I hadn’t! This course introduced me to the POMODORO TECHNIQUE.

If you haven’t come across it yet, it is a time management approach developed in the late 1980s, and named after the Pomodoro kitchen timer.

The reason I found this so useful?

Because I have always felt that there was no point starting to write unless I had at least a clear hour available. Anything less than that seemed to me to be unproductive, and I hate to get started only to find I have to give up.

The nub of the Pomodoro technique, though, is that you work for exactly 25 minutes. Not more, and not less.

If you have that magic hour free, then you can fit two sessions in, with a small gap in the middle for coffee making or similar.

I guess, now I think about it, that this is at least partially based on the knowledge that we (humans) can only concentrate fully for 20 minutes at a time, so the 25 minutes stretches that just a touch, followed by the short break, and then back for another 20 (or 25) minutes work.

What it has meant for me, personally, is that my next book is coming along much quicker than previous ones, because I can often find 25 minutes spare, where I might have to wait days to find one of those precious hour gaps.

It has enabled me to give myself permission to write for just 25 minutes, and without guilt that I didn’t get that full hour of work in.

Crazy, huh? But it’s working for me.

I’ve finally realised that my one hour rule is yet another of those dreaded procrastinations we writers are often so prone to.

How about all of you, how do you manage your time?

Even if you are a full time writer, with all the guff that goes with it these days, how do you arrange your productive writing sessions?

Does anyone else have a favoured minimum writing time?

Deborah Jay

Mystery, magic and mayhem

Join me at:

http://deborahjayauthor.com/

https://www.facebook.com/DeborahJay

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7172608.Deborah_Jay

Amazon author page: http://viewAuthor.at/DeborahJay

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“Vicious Circle” in Quantum Wanderlust

September 27, 2017 / Marcia Meara / 4 Comments

Staci Troilo is part of a new time travel anthology. You can download “Quantum Wanderlust” for free, too! Check out Staci’s post for more information and a great excerpt.

Staci Troilo

Quantum Wanderlust The time travel anthology I’m part of released last week. It’s currently doing rather well, but things could always be better. It’s totally free, so a download costs you nothing but a few seconds of your time.

If you want to write a review, though, that would be really helpful. And really, it won’t take too much longer than the actual download does.

Let me tell you a little about my story, “Vicious Circle”.

Picture, if you will, a man who is holding onto his sanity by one frayed, tenuous thread. He’s struggling with everything—physically, personally, professionally. He’s got one last chance to turn things around. It’s a long shot, but he has to take it. If only he knew what was going to happen. It would make things so much easier to plan and react.

Can you imagine his surprise when he’s transported into the future and gets a glimpse…