Category: Guest Posts

Hollywood Dreaming by R.J. Smith

Screenwriter R. J. Smith

Stephen Hise has been after me for over a year now to pen a guest post and he’s finally gotten his way. Not because of some poetically driven hyperbole that I might telepathically transport to the keyboard; but simply because I’ve travelled the yellow brick road to Hollywood and found the gates are securely locked.

I know, I know. I’m supposed to cage my juvenile urge to crash the golden gates and bang on the door of Paramount and SCREAM, “I’m a talented screenwriter, let me in!”

LA will have none of it. They’ll dispatch the Los Angeles Police to drag my pee’s and q’s from the gates and throw me into the back of the literary bus.

No, dear reader, I haven’t been assaulted by the LA County Sheriff’s Office, not yet.

I do, however, have much to impart to those of you who are thinking of laying down your indie pens and taking a swipe at screenwriting gold, or nightmares, depending on how many Xanax you can get your hands on. Continue reading “Hollywood Dreaming by R.J. Smith“

Allowing the story to come to you by Shelly Frome

Author Shelly Frome
Author Shelly Frome

There was an instructor at a prestigious college program in the Midwest who always gave this advice. Never try to write a novel. Rather, try not to write. And if the time ever comes when you can’t help yourself, when you wake up in the middle of night because the prospect of some journey keeps calling you, at that point you’ve got to get on with it and see it through.

In a way, that’s the sort of thing that happens to me. As a case in point, I never set out to write a southern gothic crime-and-blues odyssey. I never even knew such a thing existed. It all started when a friend of ours invited us down to the hill country of Mississippi. As it happens, he’d inherited a backwoods cabin and was in the process of fixing it up. At one point, he suggested that he and I take an exploratory walk. Following a narrow overgrown path, soon we became entangled in briars, edged past some barbed wire as the terrain sloped down and eventually came across some waterlogged broken limbs sticking out like menacing pitchforks. Fearing that perhaps we’d gotten lost, I turned to him and said, “Bob, do you have any idea where we are?” Continue reading “Allowing the story to come to you by Shelly Frome”

Getting it Right: Juries by Karen Wyle

Author and attorney Karen A. Wyle

[This is part 2 of a three part “Getting it Right” series by author and attorney Karen A. Wyle. This series is aimed at helping authors understand and add meaningful and convincing detail in writing courtroom drama. Part 1 can be found here.]

As promised, here are a few basics about juries.

There are some kinds of cases that may or may not be tried to a jury, and other kinds of cases where there will never be a jury.

In a criminal case where there is a possibility of more than six months’ imprisonment, a defendant has a right to trial by jury. In some states, a defendant facing less than six months also has that right. If you’re charged with an infraction, such as a parking ticket, you probably can’t get a jury trial. Continue reading “Getting it Right: Juries by Karen Wyle“

Why Discovery Is Your Mount Everest By Kathy Meis

Kathy Meis

At a publishing conference this winter, author and futurist David Houle hushed the crowd with this startling fact: last week, he said, there were more books published than in the entirety of 1950. Let that sink in…a year of books is being published every single week. That’s a very crowded book marketplace.

With barriers to entry nearly eliminated in publishing, this trend will continue to accelerate in 2012 and beyond. What does that mean for you as a writer? It means that discovery is going to be your biggest challenge. I know, you thought writing, editing and rewriting your book would be the highest mountain you’d have to climb. It’s up there, but if you want anyone to read or buy your books, discovery will be your real Mount Everest.

Don’t lose heart. When a problem is this big, a lot of people start studying it and creating solutions. That’s what we’re doing at my company, Serendipite Studios. We started with a simple question. How can we help writers more effectively find readers in today’s crowded, noisy book marketplace? Continue reading “Why Discovery Is Your Mount Everest By Kathy Meis”