Congrats to AL Kaplan

Congratulations to AL Kaplan, whose entry won this week’s Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge.

The voter-selected story is recognized with a special feature here today and wins a place in our 2014 Flash Fiction Anthology, which will be published as an e-book when this year’s challenges are completed.

Without further ado, here’s the winning story:

Continue reading “Congrats to AL Kaplan”

Introduction to Tumblr

Kat CantwellGuest Post
by Kat Cantwell

My mum – Lynne Cantwell, to you lot – mentioned that IU was looking for a post on Tumblr, since it’s such a black hole to so many Indie authors, but it’s becoming a ‘thing,’ of late. (At least, it is among people in their mid-teens to early 30s.) So I was asked if I could give a bit of a crash course.

Tumblr is this interesting and sometimes confusing cross between a blog and Pinterest (I suppose is the best way to describe it). While it can certainly be used as a blog, most people don’t go that route, because it’s not hard to lose text posts in what tends to be a very image-heavy medium. Tumblr is also mostly used to share things that other people post; I rarely post anything of my own, but I’m always reposting something that other people have (re)posted. Continue reading “Introduction to Tumblr”

Series vs. Serials

What is the real difference between a series and a serial? Is one merely a subset of the other? Perhaps the difference is largely semantic. Or maybe the lines have blurred a bit.

I like to try to make the distinction that a series is a set of books with the same main character or characters, with each book representing a self-contained story. With a series, it doesn’t matter much whether you read the books in order. There is no over-arching story. Nothing carries from one book to the next. The characters may not even age. My favorite example of a series is the Doc Savage books. Continue reading “Series vs. Serials”