Today I have a surprise for my facebook and website friends.  The following is the prologue to HEROES.  It tells of the dilemma that Hawk Jameson is about to face, and of the fear, the frustration that has been forced upon him by the invasion of Kuwait, and Hussein’s obsession to possess the oil…

HEROES   BOUND INTO A BOOK – four of the most beautiful words in Webster’s. Tuesday, July 19, 2011, the author’s copy of the softback version of HEROES was waiting at my door step.  I’ve got to tell you there was major excitement at this writer’s (oops, make that author’s) house.  I’ve been told that we’re…

On 2-21-11 I wrote a blog post describing some of the different trailers I knew about. The book trailer is the one I want to talk about today. Most of us are familiar with movie trailers, sometimes called clips. We’ve seen these on TV or at the theatre during the previews. What do they tell…

Logos have been around for a long time.  I mean a very long time.  Aristotle lived during 358 BC and he believed there were three artistic proofs that we can create: the appeals from ethos, pathos, and logos.   Logos is a Greek word and the basis for the English word logic. The impact of…

As the title of this post tells you, the galleys are here.  Now the hard work begins. Three-hundred pages of text to sift through, page by page, line by line, word by word, looking for errors.  The possibilities are endless; it could be an omitted word, or too many spaces between words in a sentence,…

In the last post I told you about my story that turned into a manuscript, and its’ journey to Author House.  I also talked about the submission process and how my manuscript had to be edited and formatted to the publisher’s specifications.  So, today the process continues with information about the book galleys. Exactly what…

The joy and the frustration of a book going to press, this is what I want to talk about today. We all know that before a writer can even think about printing a book, and way before the submission process, first and foremost there’s got to be a story; this story must be turned into…

Critique is a pretty sounding French word that means the act or art of criticizing. Criticize, on the other hand is not so pretty sounding, it normally makes us aware we’ve done something questionable. I’ve always heard, “It’s not what you say, but the way you say it.” As a beginning writer, living in Kansas…

“Trailers for sale or rent, rooms to let, 50 cents, you’re a man of means, by no means, king of the road.” If you happen to be fifty or older you probably remember the above lyrics as belonging to Roger Miller. If you are younger, then you missed a catchy little song, and a huge…

Rejection, however one wants to sugarcoat it, it is what it is, and it hurts. I’ve heard that many lessons, oft times missed, come with failing or being rejected. So, whatever you’re working to accomplish, hang in there, rejection is just a word, erase it, delete it and keep trying. Succeeding is somewhat the same…