Looking ahead to Thanksgiving in two more days, I have spent some time considering all that I have to be thankful for. First and foremost, is my family. I am blessed with terrific kids and grand-kids who have been so good to me in a most difficult year. So have all my brothers and sisters and cousins and nieces and nephews. What would we do without family? Next I would have to say I am most thankful for all the friends I have; those here in my small town as well as those in the larger arena that is the Internet and social media. Who would have thought that one person could have thousands of friends on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Google+. It boggles the mind and thrills me to hear from readers who have enjoyed my books. I am also thankful for the advances in publishing that have opened so many doors for writers. When I started my writing career, back when dinosaurs typed on old Royal manual typewriters, there were few choices for places to submit a book, and most of th...

Memoirs have become very popular of late, and I think that is due, in part, on the fact that so many Boomers are becoming "of a certain age" and discovering the importance of that connection between now and the past. Kim Pearson has written several posts here at The Blood Red Pencil about memoir writing, and here is a link to one of her more recent posts about dealing with the facts. If you are inclined to write a memoir, her series is most helpful. The following is taken from a memoir I have been working on in between my fiction projects, and in looking at this piece I realize how quickly we can forget those things that molded us into the people we are today. Perhaps capturing the memories is more important than we ever thought. "One day when I was reminiscing about high school, I dug out my high school yearbooks – I won’t tell you how old they were, but it was a relief to find the pages didn't crumble. Anyway, my intent was just to look for a picture of someon...

Sometimes we authors don't catch little mistakes in our books that can jerk a reader out of a story. That is one reason why books should really be professionally edited before being published, but sometimes even an editor does not catch everything.  For example, not too long ago I read the following in a published book, "He looked for the creak in his knees as he walked down the stairs." Hmmm. How do you look for a sound? Maybe it's just me and I'm too literal minded, but that stopped me when I read it. I know writing is a creative endeavor and we can be clever with some word usage, but maybe we should not be mixing up words and coming out with a tossed salad. Here are some other awkward or incorrect word usages that I hate to see in a finished book: Each one worse than the next. That should be each one worse than the last. (Think about it.) On accident. You can do something on purpose but not on accident. He did good vs. He did well - Little Johnny pla...

In a recent blog post, Joe Konrath, a successful indie author, wrote a response to James Patterson's commentary about the death of traditional publishing being the death of literature. One of the points Patterson made in an ad he ran in the New York Times was that without traditional publishing there would be no quality control over what is published. Actually, he inferred that there might be no more books, quality or not. Konrath wrote that just because the publishing paradigm is shifting, the future of literature is quite safe. As to the issue of quality control, Konrath pointed out that there are good freelance editors - ahem, those of us here at The Blood Red Pencil among them - as well as critique groups and beta readers to help writers maintain a high standard of writing. You can read Konrath's entire post on his blog, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing.   When I read Konrath's article, I found it supportive of the post Terry Odell did here last month on the value...