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Basic Author Skills for 2023
One of my life-long goals is to be a working novelist that people want to read. When I started out, though, the writer’s job was just writing, and for the last fifty or so years, that’s the skill I’ve tried to refine. But that’s not the only skill a writer needs. Here are some other…
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Social Sourcing Ideas about First Cover Design
For The Last American, I reached out to my Facebook friends and asked what they thought of this baseline cover design. I got some really interesting (in a good way) feedback, ranging from “Looks like a great read” to a fairly detailed evaluation from a HIGHLY respected graphic design friend. Nobody mentioned the hand I…
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The Last American: The Backstory
I started writing The Last American at the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. At the time, we were living in a log cabin on Smith Mountain Lake. The story takes place in a fictional part of that same county, where the narrator’s family has been for generations. We were all unsure back then. Scared about a lot…
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The Next Story in the Series
I thought I had a real head start on my next story while The Seven Coins: Convergence is in Alpha Reads. I was wrong. Even though I have a completed draft, it was written before I really zeroed in on some key character attributes and motivations. It was crafted through a different lens than that…
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The Seven Coins Universe
As I’m approaching the finish line on the second book in my series (chronologically, the fourth), I thought it might be helpful, especially for Alpha and Beta readers, to see my vision for the series. The series arc spans a score of millennia and multiple universes, but it does, in truth, center around a single,…
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How a Story Starts
Want to know how a story idea starts? For me, ideas for the Seven Coins series have emerged over the past three years. In that time, I’ve tweaked and morphed the global story maybe a dozen times. I like things to interconnect and overlap, so mapping out ideas and their connections is important. Last night,…