COMING SOON TO AUDIO

Hopefully in time for Halloween!

Tell Me What You Think of the Sample. 

Do You Listen to Audio Books?

Why?

Why not? 

Available to Download Now

HUNTER'S MOON:
 

 Only $3.47!!

 https://www.amazon.com/Hunters-Moon/dp/B01LZJXBD6/

WRITING TIPS & THE PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND THEM

THERE IS ALWAYS REASON BEHIND MADNESS ... AND TRUTH, TOO

Something to remember in these political debates ... and in the wisdom given to us on how to write well.

WRITE SHORTER

Every extra word makes readers impatient in these short-attention span days. 

Got to keep checking on those FB posts, you know.

Write as if each word cost you 50 cents.  Shorter prose is more powerful.

SHRINK THOSE SENTENCES!

Tiny draws attention in this big world.

Long sentences make readers work too hard to get to your main point.  

Break sentences into bite-size ideas.  Be Hemingway not Longfellow.

PASSIVE IS THE NEW POISON 

Passive voice sentences hide who is acting, creating uneasiness unconsciously in your reader.  Not good!

Be the detective of your own sentences -- find out who is the actor in each sentence and link him to the verb.

ERASE JARGON. FOCUS ON CLARITY

Jargon and Tech words just make your readers feel stupid. Way bad.

It doesn't make you sound smart.  

It makes you look as if you are talking down to your reader.

Tell your story as if you were relaying it to your mother or next door neighbor.  Tell the tale to make the most impact to the most people.

PUSH TO THE HEAD OF THE LINE

Move key scenes and insights up as close to the front of your novel, chapter, sentence as you can.

You are not making a case in a court of law where you have to lay a foundation fact by fact.

You have only a few sentences to get the readers' attention.  

Don't waste those few precious moments.  

Grab your audience right out of the gate -- at the first sentence if possible.

CLUES 

Authors use foreshadowing to hint at future important events. 

Whether consciously or unconsciously,

readers pick up on these clues if they read and use them to make predictions about what will happen later in the story.

It creates tension and suspense, keeping the reader turning the pages.

FINALLY A CANDIDATE I CAN VOTE FOR!

Wouldn't you rather vote for him?

WHERE WE WANT TO BE

https://www.amazon.com/Hunters-Moon/dp/B01LZJXBD6/

Are you where you want to be  ...

   in your book ... in your career ... in your life?

Few of us could answer YES to that question in all the areas of our life.

Are we trying too hard to DO

 and forgetting simply to LIVE.

1.) ASK: DO YOU EVEN LIKE YOUR JOB OR YOUR DREAM?

What prompted you to that profession, to that dream (say of writing).

In the bustle of the struggle, we forget to think of the answer to that question.

Ask: Is this for me?

If the answer to that question is YES focus on what is most important at work, 

instead of worrying about your own expectations.


STILL ...

The odds are you are NOT happy at work.

52.3 % of us are not according to a new study.

 The prospects for long-term work with the same employer have eroded 

and employees have been saddled with ever-higher health plan deductibles and payroll deductions.


2.) WHAT TO DO TO BECOME HAPPIER IN AN UNHAPPY JOB 

Decide what is making you unhappy about your job and change what you can.

Sometimes you cannot change the external so then you must try to change the internal.  

Change the stories you are telling yourself about your situation -- 

 “I can’t stand this,” “This is awful,” or “I should be doing something else with my life.”

Unpleasant does not mean unbearable.  

Life has its seasons (each teaches us important lessons if we but listen.) 

Cursing at the rain never kept anyone dry.

We are where we are.  

Try to find the humor in each hour or try to bring a smile to a co-worker.

Perspective is everything:

There are those in the Third World who would be astounded that you are miserable compared to where they are in their lives.


3.) BUILD MEANING WHERE YOU CAN 

Find meaning where you can.  Sometimes the relationships are what makes a job endurable.

Other times, the relationships are what gnaw at you.  

Those miserable people teach you how NOT to be,

and they have to live with their dissatisfaction and bitterness every minute.

Imagine being angry within all the time.  

There is worth in even the most minor of tasks if we do them with pride and integrity.


4.) CONNECT YOUR JOB TO BED-ROCK VALUES

Your job allows you to pay the bills and to care for your family -- that, at least, is positive.

If possible, place photos or reminders of those you love on your desk, in your locker ...

You will feel better for doing what is needed for them.

Perhaps your job allows you off time to pursue your dreams or to pay for tuition to reach your dreams.


 5.) MAKE YOUR OWN MANTRA

Come up with things to think as you go about your work day such as:

What Blessings Are Mine Right Now?

Remember to Practice Kindness Today.

Let Go of What I Cannot Control.

Listen to What My Heart Is Trying To Tell Me.

Be Productive Yet Calm -- Inch By Inch and It is a Cinch.

Just Breathe.


 6.)  FOCUS ON WHAT MATTERS MOST

We often create unachievable expectations for ourselves.

 Re-evaluate what you are doing and what you really need to do. 

Look for the quality, not quantity of work. 

Stop equating hours with doing a good job at your work or with your dream.



7.) LEAVE WORK AT WORK -- ESPECIALLY DURING DAYS OFF.

Plan the day and week to get what’s most important done during work hours.

 Make tasks fun or enjoyable; they are not tasks but just part of your life. Experience them.



8.) GIVE YOURSELF THE GIFT OF FREE TIME

 It’s not just becoming more efficient at work. You need to grant yourself permission to do less, and to begin living your life again.

Whatever re-charges your emotional batteries, plan a segment of time each day to do it.

It is a proven fact that if you do only 2 minutes of planned exercise a day, you will feel happier.



9.) DROP THE SUNDAY NIGHT BLUES.

 If you feel a sinking feeling in your stomach each night before you start your work week,

 realize that 5/7 of your life is made up of your employment.

Seek ways to bring a smile or happiness to each hour you are working (or writing).

Insist that you are going to make those 5/7 of your life worth living.

Look for reasons to laugh or smile each hour.  

Look for a stressed face at work and try to ease the tightness you see there.


10.) LIFE IS FLEETING ... EXPERIENCE IT; DON'T SIMPLY ENDURE IT!

IN TIME FOR HALLOWEEN!

https://www.amazon.com/Hunters-Moon/dp/B01LZJXBD6/

"It is not that there are no monsters.  There are.  But if we do not show mercy to one another, why should we expect it from them?" 

 - Samuel McCord 

Just in time to give to yourself and to others for a Halloween Treat is my audio book of HUNTER'S MOON!

Go to its Amazon page and try out its sample and see if you like it.

WRITER'S BLOCK_What to Do About It

“Neurotic inhibitions of productivity.” 

That was what Dr. Edmund Bergler called it in the 1940's.  Who the heck is Edmund Bergler anyway, you ask?

He was the man who first coined the term : Writer's Block.

After conducting multiple interviews and spending years with writers suffering from creative problems, 

he discarded some of the theories that were popular at the time.

They hadn't drained themselves dry. They were not victim of a lack of external motivation: pay the landlord.

Nor did they lack talent nor possessed by laziness nor were they simply bored. 

In a 1950 paper called “Does Writer’s Block Exist?,” published in American Imago, 

a journal founded by Freud in 1939, Bergler argued that a writer is like a psychoanalyst.

 He “unconsciously tries to solve his inner problems via the sublimatory medium of writing.” 

A blocked writer is actually blocked psychologically—

and the way to “unblock” that writer is through therapy. 

Psychiatrists all over America are now rubbing their hands 

in eager anticipation of hordes of anguished writers.

Not so fast there, Doc!

In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the Yale University psychologists Jerome Singer and Michael Barrios 

tried to gain a more empirically grounded understanding of what it meant to be creatively blocked. 

To give you the Cliff Notes version of their findings:

 Blocked writers did, indeed, suffer from 

flagging motivation, felt less joy in writing, daydreamed less, and could not recall their dreams.

Ah, Ha!

The famous prolific writer, Graham Greene, fell victim to the dreaded Writer's Block 

and stumbled onto a solution that worked for him.

In his fifties, he faced a creative “blockage,” as he called it, 

that prevented him from seeing the development of a story or even, at times, its start. In his youth, he had kept a dream journal.

The dream journal proved to be his savior.

 Dream journaling was a very special type of writing, Greene believed. 

No one but you sees your dreams. No one can sue you for libel for writing them down. No one can fact-check you or object to a fanciful turn of events.

He once told a friend:

 “If one can remember an entire dream, the result is a sense of entertainment sufficiently marked to give one the illusion of being catapulted into a different world . . . .

 One finds oneself remote from one’s conscious preoccupations.”

 In that freedom from conscious anxiety, Greene found the freedom to do what he otherwise couldn’t: write.

 Such escapes allow writers to find comfort in the face of uncertainty;

 they give writers’ minds the freedom to imagine, 

even if the things they imagine seem ludicrous, unimportant, and unrelated to any writing project.

Greene once had the following dream:

"I was working one day for a poetry competition and had written one line

—‘Beauty makes crime noble’—

when I was interrupted by a criticism flung at me from behind by T.S. Eliot. 

‘What does that mean? How can crime be noble?’ He had, I noticed, grown a moustache."

Suffering from Writer's Block?  

Why not try putting down your last dream into prose?  

As Louis L'Amour wrote: "The water does not flow until you turn on the faucet." 

Go ahead: explore your inner self.  You might be surprised what you find.

THE SOUL SELECTS HER OWN COMPANY

I was sitting alone at my table in the darkened Meilori's. The light of my laptop showed the dismal numbers of those who have bought my books this month.

Fingertips pressed softly on my shoulder.  "May this wayward soul sit down?"

I looked up.  Emily Dickinson, dressed in a black Victorian dress, stood smiling sadly at me.

Her voice was gentle, low, and caring.  I smiled back.  "Of course."

I got up and pulled out the chair for her.  She flowed down into as lady-like ghosts often do here at Meilori's.

As I sat back down, Emily slid a small volume to me.  Its cover was dark and light lavender.  Its simple title: POEMS ~ Emily Dickinson.

"This first volume of my poetry appeared on this day in 1890, two years after my death.  

My early editors, the critic Thomas Higginson and family friend Mabel Loomis Todd, made many changes in an effort to make my poems more 'conventional,' but these had not allayed the priggish critics."

 Emily picked up the volume from in front of me and read one of her "versicles" as her critics called them:

"The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.

Unmoved, she notes the chariot's pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.

I've known her from an ample nation
Choose one
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone."

Emily withdrew a folded newspaper clipping from her dress pocket.

"I told others that my critics bothered me not.  But here is the lie: this aged review by Thomas Bailey Aldrich from THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY of January, 1892.  It reads as follows:

'But the incoherence and formlessness of her — I don't know how to designate them — versicles are fatal…. 

An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar.'"

Her hand gently covered mine.  "You are of worth, young sir, because you care.  Your prose is of worth if only one soul is uplifted because of it."

Emily smiled, “I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.  I read one of yours and it does the same."

Her eyes sparkled,   “We turn not older with years but newer every day.  You are newer today than yesterday for you have suffered, you have learned -- so you are a new you."

The ghost of Mark Twain sat down beside me with a laugh.


 "Besides, son, where are those critics of Miss Dickinson here now?  Who do folks remember?  Emily Dickinson or that Thomas Bailey Aldrich?"

He winked at Emily who blushed, and he grinned,

"I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value--certainly no large value...

However, let it go. It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden."

Emily scolded him.  "That is all very well and good, Samuel, but what about your feelings for poor Miss Jane Austen?"

Mark looked like he had bitten into a slug.  "Agh!  You're right, of course.  I haven't any right to criticize books.  And I don't do except when I hate them!"

He rubbed his face. 


"I often want to criticize Jane Austen it is true.  But, Lordy, her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader.  Therefore I have to stop every time I begin."

He took out a cigar and lit it as Emily's nose wrinkled in distaste and went on, 


"Everytime I read PRIDE AND PREJUDICE I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone!"  

Emily gently removed the cigar from his mouth, putting it out defiantly.  "It is so heartening to see how you have mellowed with age, Samuel."

He glared at me.  "Now, you see why gentlemen are a dying breed, Roland."

"Or at least a smokeless one," I smiled.

A GREAT POST

No, not mine!  Who do you think I am, 

the ghost of Mark Twain?

Ouch!  

He swatted me with his white bowler hat again! 

No, it is a blog post describing how you can learn how to improve your writing 

by reverse-engineering the hit Netflix series, STRANGER THINGS:

http://blog.bookbaby.com/2016/09/things-i-learned-about-storytelling-stranger-things/

I hear the actress who played Eleven, Millie Bobbie Brown,

 has not been told by the Duffer Brothers if she will be back for Season 2 ...

although she has repeatedly emailed them asking.  

Not cool on their part.  

If she does not return, then neither will I as a viewer.

To me, she was the heart of the show.

I know I will not be missed.  :-)

Oh, don't forget!  This October the Old West meets Sidhe, Dragons, and vampire kingdoms in France!

SLUSH PILE ON DISPLAY

 Have you noticed how many Indie Books are being published monthly?

I hope none of you have books scheduled to be self-published in December.  

After NaNo, Amazon will be bulging from books written in November ...

hurriedly thrown together novels that may well bring 

the pugnacious ghost of Ernest Hemingway to their bedside to punch them in the snoot!

Writing is a craft no matter the genre.  

If a book bumps and thumps like my first car

with no properly paced suspense or

 carefully laid plot threads or dialogue straight out of Stilted English 101 ...

It is badly crafted ... and makes it that less likely that 

a browsing Reader on Amazon will take a chance on your self-published book.


For $10, readers can subscribe to Kindle Unlimited and freely access 700,000 titles --

 most supplied by Indie Authors.

And usually they are high quality, low cost books.

In other words, power readers have over 700,000 fewer reasons to buy our books!


We have fewer channels in which to be discovered than traditionally published books.  

We are literally one book in millions of ebooks out there.

What can we do?

1) WE CAN WRITE MORE 

The more books you have out there, the more likely you will hit upon a winner.  

And we will have a back-list that will give a new fan new books to snap up

once she has discovered us.


2) WE CAN DIVERSITY

We can do paperbacks.  

We can produce our own audio books through ACX.  

ACX picks the prices but you can do short story collections or novellas which will cost the curious listener less.


3) GET BETTER

Which ties in to writing more.  

The more we write, the better we will become.  Read the masters whenever you can.

Learn your craft from novels you like.  Study them like textbooks. 

If you are not growing as a writer, you are becoming stale.  

And stale anything from bread to books get tossed.


4) GOOD ENOUGH IS FATAL

Even your 99 cent book must be sizzle.  

It could be picked up at a pivotal time by a pivotal reviewer.  

Write it as if it is destined to be your Break-Away Novel.


5) END WITH LINKS

No, not with a golf course!

There are still book clubs out there.  

Goodreads is a cyber one.  

End your books with links that will lead your readers to sites which sparked your book.

You've written other books?  Fine.  Link to them at the end.

Here's a thought:

If a moment in your book speaks to a prior adventure,

LINK to that book at that juncture.  

Hit while the reader's interest is aroused, while the iron is hot so to speak.


6) YOU ARE YOUR LOGO

Heard of Author Branding?  

YOU are your brand.  

Make each novel something of which to be proud, something that will linger in your reader's imagination long after the last page is turned.


7) BE NICE

The producer of the fiasco of the anthology with which I was last associated did not understand that:

THIS IS A BUSINESS.  But ... 

IT IS ALSO A BAND OF BROTHERS. 

(Sorry but Sisters just lacked Alliterative Umph!)

The Indie Book Community is much like the characters in a Charles Dickens novel --

We are all connected in ways that will astound us in the future 

in how our little kindnesses affected hurting souls ...

that encourage cyber-strangers to toot our horn, to spread the word about how great our novels are, to care if we succeed or fail.

Treat partners, fellow authors, and readers with KINDNESS, RESPECT, and INTEGRITY.

The Indie World, despite the explosion of titles, will get smaller and smaller the longer you are in it.

Be a constant source of positive regard and humor.

If you are naturally cranky and cross, 

buy a cat and cuss him out.  Cats don't care so long as you feed them!

 Doors are not opened for bullying, grasping Indie Authors who only care about themselves, 

who pout like immature teenagers when the world fails to revolve around them.


8) DARE TO BE DELUSIONAL

Dream big.  Experiment.  Long books not selling?  Write short ones or collections of short stories.  

Write a volume of Poetry: ZOMBIE HAIKU'S FOR THOSE WITH BRAINS TOO ROTTED TO EAT.

Hey, you'd spend 99 cents just to see what is inside that book, wouldn't you?

Do you think the creator of the PET ROCK was endorsed by his friends and family?  

Who laughed all the way to the bank?

WHAT ARE OTHER WAYS 

DO YOU THINK WE INDIE WRITERS 

CAN STAND OUT 

OR JUST SURVIVE?!

Oh,

Coming this October,

Roland demonstrates his inability to Learn!

TO BE A CHILD AT HEART

Remember when you had the wonder and curiosity of a child ... 

before the prosaic poisons of adulthood gave you wisdom and snatched away your innocence?

Most children are swept up by a voracious and indiscriminate curiosity, 

which transforms them into masters of observation, 

far surpassing adults whose perceptions have been dulled with a crushing number of responsibilities. 

E. B. White wrote:


“Children … are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth.”

He also wrote:

 “Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.”

Which is pretty good advice to writers no matter to whom their books are aimed.

What impresses us as children often stays with us for the rest of our lives ...

Pablo Neruda's memory of the hand through a fence:

One time, investigating in the backyard of our house in Temuco the tiny objects and minuscule beings of my world,

 

I came upon a hole in one of the boards of the fence.

I looked through the hole and saw a landscape like that behind our house, uncared for, and wild.

I moved back a few steps, because I sensed vaguely that something was about to happen. All of a sudden a hand appeared — a tiny hand of a boy about my own age.

By the time I came close again, the hand was gone, and in its place there was a marvelous white sheep.

The sheep’s wool was faded. Its wheels had escaped. All of this only made it more authentic.

I had never seen such a wonderful sheep. I looked back through the hole, but the boy had disappeared.

I went into the house and brought out a treasure of my own: a pine-cone, opened, full of odor and resin, which I adored. I set it down in the same spot and went off with the sheep. 

To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life.

To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life.

But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know,

from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses —

that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.

That exchange brought home to me for the first time a precious idea: that all of humanity is somehow together…

 Patti Smith's memory of the swan:

When I was very young, my mother took me for walks in Humboldt Park, along the edge of the Prairie River.

I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates,

of an old boathouse, a circular band shell, an arched stone bridge.

The narrows of the river emptied into a wide lagoon and I saw upon its surface a singular miracle.

A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage.

Swan, my mother said, sensing my excitement. It pattered the bright water, flapping its great wings, and lifted into the sky.

The word alone hardly attested to its magnificence nor conveyed the emotion it produced.

The sight of it generated an urge I had no words for, a desire to speak of the swan,

to say something of its whiteness, the explosive nature of its movement, and the slow beating of its wings.

The swan became one with the sky. I struggled to find words to describe my own sense of it.

Swan, I repeated, not entirely satisfied, and I felt a twinge, a curious yearning, imperceptible to passersby, my mother, the trees, or the clouds.

And Patti Smith has been trying to put the intangible into words ever since.

Albert Einstein's childhood meeting with a compass:

 The development of the world of thought is in a certain sense a continuous flight from “wonder,”he believed:

A wonder of this kind I experienced as a child of four or five years when my father showed me a compass. 

That this needle behaved in such a determined way did not at all fit 

in the kind of occurrences that could find a place in the unconscious world of concepts (efficacy produced by direct “touch”). I can still remember

 — or at least believe I can remember — 

that this experience made a deep and lasting impression upon me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.
  

Behind the cotton wool of life is hidden a pattern.  

The whole world is a work of art 

if you have but 

the child's sense of wonder 

to see it.

What do you think?