Celebrating Independent Authors
Today we have the book video trailer for Lisa Winkler’s Black History/biography: On the Trail of the Ancestors: A Black Cowboy’s Ride Across America.
A fascinating Black History memoir tells the little-known six-month adventure of an African-American cowboy who rode horseback from Manhattan to California.
On the Trail of the Ancestors: A Black Cowboy’s Ride Across America is available through Amazon.com.
[This article is part of a series by author Lin Robinson on the subject of so-called “rules” of writing. You can find the other articles here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.]
In this series I have mostly dealt with negative “rules” — adjurations to avoid the use of various parts of English speech that are perfectly useful.
In this final article I’d like to switch to debunking several “positive” kinds of “rules”: concepts which are urged, even pressed onto writers as necessary, but which I’d suggest you drop not just from you tool kit, but from your vocabulary.
The Myth Of “The Protagonist” — One of the most repeated and most utterly useless concepts for writers is “protagonist”. It’s a word that does absolutely nothing for you, and can mess you up. Perhaps you’ve seen newbies wailing, “Can I have more than one protagonist?” (And in screenplay circles, sometimes get answers like “OK, if it’s a ‘buddy movie'”, or “OK if it’s an ‘ensemble’ movie”, otherwise no. How about love stories. Do you really have to make one of the pair the main show and the other one subsidiary? How about a story of two rivals? But they’ll tell you that you have to because that’s the way it is and who are you to argue with Aristotle? Continue reading “Breaking the “Rules” Part 5 by Lin Robinson“
Luke Romyn spent many years, over seventeen in fact, working in the security industry. From door work in some of Australia’s roughest pubs and clubs to protecting Mickey Mouse and the Disney crew from the overzealous jaws of tenacious toddlers, Luke has worked throughout Australia and internationally in a vast array of roles.
He’s done close protection for UK celebrities in Fiji and chased feral pigs and snakes out of the jungle film sets on Steven Spielberg’s and Tom Hank’s epic: The Pacific. There are few things Luke hasn’t seen.
With all this experience behind him, it would be tempting to write a set of memoirs. Instead, Luke utilized it to fuel his own expansive imagination and began writing fiction. Initially starting with short stories, Luke rapidly progressed onto novels. His first book, THE DARK PATH, has been a Top 20 Bestselling Horror on Amazon and was also voted in the Top Ten Horror novels of 2009. BLACKLISTED, his second novel, saw his writing divert slightly away into the action-thriller genre while his third, BEYOND HADES, is out on 16th April, 2012. Continue reading “Meet the Author: Luke Romyn”
Now that I stuck that neat little ear-worm in your mind…
I read a blog just recently that touched on that very subject, though. (Thanks Ashley Barron. http://bit.ly/HN4BzU )
It seems one of our failings as self/indie published authors is that people perceive us as not having any leadership or defined standards, and that’s why we’re not taken very seriously. We’re sort of the Wild West of the publishing world. I’m okay with that but I would both argue the point, and beg to differ. True, there are a large number of Indie writers for whom proper English, spelling and grammar are somewhat alien. There is a valid argument to be made there in many cases. If there was any benefit to traditional publishing it was that – it filtered out the thousands of wannabe writers who simply didn’t want to do the work. (Yes, it’s okay to break the rules. First know what the rules are.) Continue reading “Who’s got the power…!”
