Month: May 2013

Vote Now and Free Your Brain Up!

You feel that itching in your forebrain? That’s your brain trying to remind you to vote in this week’s flash fiction challenge. That or brain chiggers. Probably the first thing though.

We had a number of great entries. Kudos to all the entrants. Now IU readers to choose: Who will be this week’s Flash Fiction Star?

Check out this week’s entries here. Vote for your fave then use those share buttons at the bottom of the post to spread the word.

 

Which author wrote your favorite story about Og and the fire leaf?

  • Dick C Waters (49%, 19 Votes)
  • Lynne Cantwell (18%, 7 Votes)
  • Ed Drury (10%, 4 Votes)
  • Yvonne Hertzberger (8%, 3 Votes)
  • Sherri (8%, 3 Votes)
  • mandywrite (8%, 3 Votes)

Total Voters: 39

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An Indies Itchy Feet Vox Pop

I interviewed the famous and fabulous Martin Crosbie on my blog recently, and realised that he was the second Scot-transplanted-to-Canada to feature in a podcast. Then there’s me, a Londoner in Ontario. I asked him if he thought the whole emigration thing had contributed to his writing, and we mused about outsiderness for a while. Intrigued, I had a look at the Indies Bio Page and found that about half of us have moved from somewhere to somewhere else.

Not a scientific survey I’ll grant you but I wondered about the connection. I asked some of the minions, “Did you become a writer because you travelled, or did you travel because you’re a writer?”

and “Writers often consider themselves to be outsiders, observing life. Did learning to adapt to new cultures foster this aspect of your personality?”

Here are some of their answers. Let’s start with Martin… Continue reading “An Indies Itchy Feet Vox Pop”

Trademark and Copyright Issues

Guest post
by Curtis Edmonds

The main character in my book, RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY, used to work at Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta. He has a smallish collection of Coca-Cola memorabilia. And, not to put too fine a point on it, he drinks a whale of a lot of Coca-Cola. The bubbly drink is mentioned by name multiple times in the manuscript.

Am I about to get sued?

I don’t think so, but it’s not impossible. It almost happened to author Patrick Wensink, who wrote a book called “Broken Piano for President.” The cover of that book was designed as a homage to the Jack Daniels whiskey label – enough so that lawyers at Brown-Forsman, the parent company of Jack Daniels, wrote him an extremely polite letter asking him to change the cover art. That particular situation worked out well for both parties—Jack Daniels got goodwill points for handling the situation in a gentlemanly way, and Wensink got a small-but-welcome bump in sales. But it could have turned out in a much more negative way. Continue reading “Trademark and Copyright Issues”

There is no recipe for a secret sauce. Maybe.

Have you ever been in the middle of telling a story, just about to reach the climax, and everybody turned away and you weren’t able to finish. That happened to me a couple of weeks ago, except I was conducting a workshop via Skype and the power, literally went out.

One of the very cool things that happens when you achieve a little bit of success from self-publishing is that people think you have something to say. They think you have the ingredients to the secret sauce. In fact, after I passed along some advice to a fellow author a few months back, that’s exactly what she told me. She said, “You just gave me the ingredients to the secret sauce.” It reminds me of the book/movie “Fight Club”. “The first rule of Fight Club is-there is no Fight Club. That’s incorrect of course, because there was a Fight Club. Well, the first rule of self-publishing is that there is no recipe for the secret sauce. Maybe. Continue reading “There is no recipe for a secret sauce. Maybe.”