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Getting Ready for BARN Bazaar
I’m so excited! The BARN Bazaar is right around the corner and I’m counting down the days. BARN, the Bainbridge Artisan Resource Network, sponsors the Bazaar every year as an opportunity for members to share and sell their work. I’ll be showcasing my published books and sharing about my current projects with anyone who’ll linger…
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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…