Day: January 5, 2016

Handwriting Your Book – Choosing a Pen

authors fountain pen pen-631321__180Back in December, I wrote about handwriting your book before typing it on the computer. We had quite a lively discussion about it, and I was pleased to see that many authors share my love of pens and the way they feel and write. In that vein, I decided to do a little round-up of pens.

Let me note here that I did not go out and buy every pen that people mentioned in the comments of that post. Writing the article, however, and the comments that followed did provide enough momentum for me to finally restock my dwindling supply of pens. In addition to that, my husband bought several different kinds and stuffed my Christmas stocking with them, so I am now well supplied. Here are the top candidates in my limited and very biased study. Continue reading “Handwriting Your Book – Choosing a Pen”

Easy Physical Fitness for Authors

authors get fat diet-398613_960_720Yeah, that’s right. I’m an author. That means I’m cerebral. I work out with my brain, not my body, which means that my Nordic Track machine is used to hang laundry. It works quite nicely in that capacity. And now, to make matters worse, here in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway, it’s the height of Winter and that means even less moving about outside. All you folks south of the Equator – it’s too hot for you to be out and about too, right? And heap our New Year’s Resolutions on top of all this guilt – what can we do to stay in shape?

Our Laurie Boris tried to get us to start some good habits like stretching and some strange, new-fangled ergonomic stuff. All that’s fine and dandy, but I can’t really see someone like me actually making the effort to do any of it. So, in the true spirit of entrepreneurial opportunism, I’ve developed an exercise program tailored specifically for authors (and anyone who spends extended hours at a computer). Because what good is a program you won’t actually use?

That’s right, I’ve taken activities in which you participate every day and turned them into exercises! How can you go wrong? Well, duh, you can’t. Continue reading “Easy Physical Fitness for Authors”

The Rest of the Novel-Writing Iceberg

novel writing tip of the iceberg-892518_960_720The tip of the iceberg is an idiom for the part that is seen, with the implication that there’s much more that is hidden. In novel writing, the tip of the iceberg is the part of the story that makes it into print. The rest of the iceberg is all the material the author didn’t include in the final manuscript.

The amount of material that isn’t included is generally much greater than what’s contained in the novel itself. It can consist of research the author did for the story, scenes that were cut, plot lines which were abandoned, and those “extras” that R.J. Crayton identified as the “director’s cut” of the work. Continue reading “The Rest of the Novel-Writing Iceberg”