Celebrating Independent Authors
Indies Unlimited has an entire resource section dedicated to free resources for authors including pictures, music, sound effects, fonts, cover makers, and more.
Now I’m back with even more free resources for authors. Instead of free photos and music, these resources are designed to help with grammar and mechanics. Continue reading “More Free Tools for Authors: Grammar Checkers”
Everything old is new again, if you wait long enough. Every now and then, I run across an author on the internet who says, “I just had an amazing idea! I’m going to use Tarot cards in my next story! I bet nobody’s ever done that before!”
Um, well, actually, lots of people have. Goodreads even has a list of books in which a Tarot reading figures in the plot. And that list is hardly exhaustive. I can think of two books published in the late 1960s whose authors used Tarot, or a variation on Tarot, as a plot device. One is Samuel R. Delany’s Nova, in which the main character, a member of a spaceship crew, palms the Sun card so that a crucial reading cannot be finished – thereby jeopardizing the ship’s mission. The other is actually a series: Roger Zelazny’s Amber novels, in which the characters correspond to certain cards in a Tarot deck. Continue reading “Writing and the Tarot”
Guest Post
by Ernest Mendozza
Someone once said, “Being a good writer is 3% talent 97% not being distracted by the internet.” Ain’t that the truth. Just while writing this introductory paragraph, I’ve checked my email three times, changed the music twice, and went to see when the next episode of Mr. Robot airs. And that’s not counting my Twitter habit.
When you get distracted constantly and easily, the quality of your writing suffers — that much is obvious. But how do you remain distraction-free when there’s just so much stuff to pay your attention to? Especially when checking your email counts as work, and making connections on Twitter furthers your career, it’s easy to make justifications for blowing off writing for even a minute or two. Continue reading “Essential Apps for Procrastinating Writers”
I have tendinitis in my wrists, which has made typing — shall we say — a tad difficult. No typing meant I couldn’t even dream of meeting my word count goal of 1,500 words per day towards my latest novel.
After a week of Netflix bingeing, my husband was like, “You need to do some writing.” To which I responded, “I can’t.” To which he replied, “Why don’t you dictate it?” Well, that’s when I decided to look into some ways to create that didn’t involve me sitting at my computer typing.
Obviously, if the limbs you use for writing are injured — tendinitis, a broken arm, carpal tunnel — the best alternative is to learn to type with your feet. Kidding. The best alternative is probably to speak what you would have written. If you want to do that, there are two options: speaking into a recording device and having it transcribed or using speech-to-text software. Continue reading “Some Alternatives to Keep You Writing Happily Despite an Injury”