Tag: Writing

Muse Wrangling 101

Good morning Minions. The Evil Mastermind asked me to speak to you today on a subject that is close to his heart – productivity prose.

Now I know the P-word can strike fear into the hearts of the bravest of you, but it is a subject that must be addressed. We are all writers. Writing is how we produce prose, and prose is how we earn our daily gruel.

But what happens when our Muse refuses to co-operate? What happens when that gender-neutral beast sits in its cage, sulking and refusing to come out?

We get no gruel, that’s what.

I can see by your faces that most of you know what it’s like to own a stubborn Muse, the kind that forces you to stare at a blank screen for hours on end, or goes on strike mid-way through a piece, leaving you to face a deadline on your own.

It is well documented that such Muses can play havoc with a writer’s life. But what, if anything, can we do about it? Continue reading “Muse Wrangling 101”

Misadventures in Wordcraft

Say what?

Proofreading your own work is a good idea. You’ll catch some typos and maybe a few usage errors or verb tense disagreements. It is more difficult for the author of a piece to evaluate the clarity of his/her own work. After all, we know what we meant when we wrote it. That is probably going to cause us to see what we meant when we read it.

Sometimes, a sentence can be interpreted in more than one way. The results may be hilarious or just confusing. This kind of ambiguity can cause readers to pause, disrupting the rhythm of the story. Alternatively, they may misinterpret the meaning of the sentence and go forward with a key misunderstanding.

Getting more eyeballs on your manuscript will help. Brooks and I have three sets of eyeballs going over the draft of our WIP. When we are done, we’ll get it in front of some beta-readers. That doesn’t mean it will be perfect before we release it. Sometimes 100 people read and understand the sentence just as you intended. That doesn’t mean reader 101 won’t see the sentence in an entirely different way. If there is a way to misunderstand your meaning, there is always someone out there who will. Continue reading “Misadventures in Wordcraft”

Fighting the Good Fight

Guest post
by Ritu Gupta

I love gardening. I plant my seeds and nurture them through the most delicate stage of their evolution. I plant them in nutrient rich soil and water them sparingly. I put them in a warm and sunny spot and let them cook.

The seeds discover their own truth within and believe in it strongly enough to break through the soil that cocoons. They learn to grow within, expanding their roots so that they can stand tall expressing their own authentic natures. Continue reading “Fighting the Good Fight”

Does This Book Have a Sell-By Date?

do-books-have-expiration-dates-copyright-ks-brooksThe other day an indie author asked for my opinion with this series of questions: “How long is it reasonable for an indie author to keep marketing the same title and expect results? Is there an expiration time for titles in general… even trad published ones? What’s the data?”

As often happens, my first inclination was to respond, of course not, don’t be silly. As Konrath points out, an eBook is forever. There are millions, billions, or trillions of people in the world (I’m not going to look it up, but it’s a bunch, and this is the only data I’m going to provide.) No matter how many copies of a book have been sold, it is only to a miniscule portion of your target audience. Even if we exclude those who don’t or can’t read, don’t understand English, or are readers who never touch your genre, by the time an author runs out of potential customers they’ll have made enough to buy Mitt Romney or maybe even Bill Gates several times over. Continue reading “Does This Book Have a Sell-By Date?”