Author: Laurie Boris

Laurie Boris is a freelance writer, editor, proofreader, and former graphic designer. She has been writing fiction for over twenty-five years and is the award-winning author of four novels. She lives in New York’s lovely Hudson Valley. Learn more about Laurie at her website and her Amazon author page.

Eye Health for Writers

Although I was put on indefinite administrative leave for berating people into changing their ways opted for early retirement from the Wellness Police, I still like to craft the occasional post on health tips to help prolong your writing careers. I do it because you guys are important to me. Sure, it’ll help me knock down my community service hours, but that’s just a bonus.

Anyway, let’s talk about your eyes. Yes. They’re gorgeous, dahh-ling. And as long as they point straight ahead and you can find your way to the coffee pot in the morning, you probably don’t think too much about them. But eye health is vital to your writing career, for reading, writing, revising, proofreading, proofreading again, and finding your way back to the coffee pot after the first four or five cups have lost their magic. Here are a few ways to protect your precious eyeballs from the ravages of computer use and keep them looking pretty in your author photos for years to come. Even without Photoshop. Continue reading “Eye Health for Writers”

No Experience Is Wasted

Crunch time in the marketing department. Only a week before the biggest trade show of the year and I was making sales literature for products that didn’t exist yet. Everyone else had gone home. The factory workers left hours ago. During yet another trip to the copier in the engineering department, I stopped on the catwalk and leaned against the cool metal rail, listening to the sigh and wheeze of the ventilation required even when the assembly lines sat idle. Then I saw the forklift. A colleague and I had a running joke. When the job broke us, who would be the first to commandeer a forklift and race it across the factory floor? I didn’t want to wait. I longed to climb into the cockpit and take the beast for a spin before crashing it through a plate glass wall.

And because of my secret identity as a writer, I didn’t have to wait. It went into the novel. Everything goes into the novels, eventually. Continue reading “No Experience Is Wasted”

Hit the Road, Jack: How to Plan and Execute a Blog Tour

Maybe people have been telling you that a blog tour (or virtual blog tour, or VBT, not to be confused with VPL, an affliction from the ‘70s solved by some very clever but uncomfortable pantyhose) is great way to launch your book. Some would be glad to arrange one for you and charge you for the privilege. But is the marketing budget for your book release a little…what, you don’t have a marketing budget? You spent your marketing budget at the actual market, buying food and uncomfortable pantyhose? No problem. You can pull together a whiz-bang blogging adventure for next to nothing and get yourself a lot of eyeballs and buzz. I did it for my first book. I didn’t rack up gangbuster sales, but I got my name out and met some great people who were happy to help when the next book came out. All it took was a little time and effort. You have some of that, right? Okay, pour yourself a cup of coffee and let’s go. Continue reading “Hit the Road, Jack: How to Plan and Execute a Blog Tour”

Not So Little Women

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.” -Louisa May Alcott

As a thirteen-year-old bookworm following in my feminist mother’s footsteps, I tossed aside white-gloved girl detective Nancy Drew and her ilk for pioneering female authors of an earlier age: the Victorians. The writing was lovely, but after plowing through a few of the classics, oh, how it rankled. Despite Jane Austen’s relatively high-minded Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice (even though she ended up with über-hot Mr. Darcy), it still bugged the pants off me that these women were so…dull. They played the piano and did needlepoint. They spent a mind-numbing amount of time fussing with their frocks, nattering on about dances, and waiting, all that WAITING, to be introduced to men who might make suitable matches, after which they would probably die in childbirth or become young widows married off to skeevy dudes old enough to be their fathers because everyone knew they could not possibly survive without a Y chromosome in the house. Continue reading “Not So Little Women”