Tag: Tutorials for anyone

A Beginner’s Tips for Setting Up Instagram

Is Instagram for Authors?A few weeks ago, our Jim Devitt wrote a tutorial on How to Get Started on Instagram. Since I am always taking photographs, I figured this would be a great app for me. It seemed like everyone else was on Instagram, so it made sense to finally take the plunge. I was very grateful to have Jim’s article to guide me through.

Being a technological dinosaur – and that’s Ms. Megapnosaurus to you, thank you – I needed a little bit more hand-holding. So here are some tips that might help those of you new to smart phones and apps, and all that other newfangled stuff. Continue reading “A Beginner’s Tips for Setting Up Instagram”

Tips: Book Planning

Ever be cranking along on your work-in-progress (WIP) without a care and suddenly realize that your timeline is all discombobulated? Juggling numerous characters with a different point of view (POV) in each chapter has finally caught up with you. Don’t you hate it when that happens? I know I do.

This kind of thing is bound to occur, especially if you have characters who whisk off to far-away lands – which means you need to incorporate the gaps created by lengthy air travel as well as time zone changes. What a mess!

Here’s a handy little tip for you which costs nothing. In fact, it’s so simple that it may strike you as stupid initially, but sometimes simplifying is exactly what’s needed when a project goes out of control. Continue reading “Tips: Book Planning”

Tutorial: Screen Captures

How did I make this? Stay tuned and you’ll find out!

Screen captures (also known as screen shots) come in handy for many reasons. You can use them to show someone when your computer is doing something funky, preserve book reviews in an image file, capture blog comments for legal reasons, provide instructions to someone, create print-outs of web-based stuff for promotional materials, and many other purposes.

While some things put up on the Internet are “forever,” some things aren’t. So I try to grab an image of any press I get and put that on my website. I include the link at the top so people can see where the story originated, but if that link becomes void it’s now literally preserved forever on my site. Here’s an example of a story run in a Vancouver-area online newspaper. The great thing about that is that you can trim out all the other “briefs” and just focus on yours. This, of course, is just one usage. Continue reading “Tutorial: Screen Captures”