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Finding Success as a Novelist
My wife is amazing. I’m not saying that because I like her. If you know her, you already agree. Recently, her internal frump detector caught a whiff of discontent in me, and she asked the insightful questions to get to the root of what’s wrong. In a word, it’s the publishing business. I’ve known I…
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AI is a Force Multiplier for Authors
This post originally appeared on LinkedIn on 12/8/2023. 2023 has been a busy year. Life and death reminded me to get on with this author stuff and I rose to the challenge, publishing three novels and a novella, as well as an audiobook. And I might finish another before the year ends. But I couldn’t…
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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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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,…
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Closing in on Close Third Person: Learning from Dan Brown
In writing The Seven Coins, I’ve had the hardest time getting the Point of View (PoV) right. I started with an omniscient narrator, but he started getting a little snarky and my characters weren’t coning across well. Then I moved to what I thought was third person, but I was head-hopping. Head-hopping, I learned, is…
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Prepping for Nano
How do you prep for a writing contest when you can’t start writing yet? You clean up your tools… 😉