Up until my once monthly blog for The Blood Red Pencil, I had resisted blogging. I never thought I had anything to say that others hadn’t said better. I was wrong. Every writer has her own experiences to impart, her own twists on writing, whether it be genre-crossing, plot variations, or unusual characterizations. Mine is a little of all three, but mostly the latter, and because I’m self-published, no one can tell me I can’t write a character the way I want to. Readers can, of course, choose not read my books, but I hope they do. It’s easy to write good, moral characters that readers root for to overcome adversity or to find his or her love or to get the bad guy. But what about those characters pushed into circumstances that make them do illegal or unethical acts? Even murder. Some crime fiction writers tread that line, and I love when they do. Crime is dirty and messy. Writers of the genre know that, and they expect a little line crossing. I do, but how much will a reader acc...

That's me in a big way this year. You see, I've signed up for the Blogging from A to Z Challenge . Along with 2,000+ other bloggers - yes, more than 2,000! - I'll be blogging daily starting with the letter A prompt and ending with Z at the end of the month. Why do something like this? Well, the best way to boost your blog traffic and get notice from search engines is to post meaningful content on your blog regularly over an extended period of time. This is proven. The blog I'm working with was created to support a book title, the first in a trilogy, and deals with environmental themes, as well as murder and romance. So my goal going through the alphabet will include topics I might be writing about in the series. I'll also be reporting my daily word counts and hope interaction with other A to Z bloggers will inspire me, and maybe even garner a few new friends. Are any of you reading this post planning to join the A to Z venture? What is your blogging focus...

Photo credit: Google Images Publishing is changing, books are changing, reading itself is changing – and it’s all changing so fast that authors can feel that they can’t keep up. What’s a writer to do? First, we need to remember that changes in book publishing and the way readers access reading material is nothing new. Stone tablets gave way to inky scrolls which gave way to printing presses, and at every stop along the way Luddites cried. Somehow writers evolved to meet the new technologies. Back in the Victorian Era, which wasn’t really that long ago, historically speaking, one of the new publishing tactics was publishing novels in serial form in magazines and newspapers. Charles Dickens is perhaps best known for using this form, starting with The Pickwick Papers in 1836, but Dickens was not alone – in 1893 Mark Twain first published Pudd’nhead Wilson as a serial in The Century Magazine, and Joseph Conrad and George Eliot published some of their works in serial form as ...

After almost five glorious years of daily posting, we are closing the Blood-Red Pencil blog.     Now that I've gotten that out of my system, let's get down to business! I don't know what you have planned for April, but it's a busy month for me. I've wrapped up some winter projects and am ready to set my sights on new things (isn't that what spring is all about?), so I'm participating in the A-Z Blogging Challenge to goose my News From Nowhere blog . It's the platform I intend to use to promote a mystery novel trilogy I'm imagineering, with publication planned for two years in the future. To that end, I'll also be participating in Camp NaNoWriMo in an attempt to crank out 50,000 words over the next 30 days. I know many people don't think this is a good way to write anything of worth, but it gives me something tangible to work with, which in my book is worth a lot more than nothing. Otherwise I'd moodle forever and never get one...

Interested in raising money for your next self-publishing or under-funded traditional publishing project? You should definitely look into using the new sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo that allow you to raise money from potential readers. However, contrary to popular belief, you can't just throw a page up on a crowdfunding platform and watch the funds roll in. There are several reasons that having an established network of bloggers will help your project succeed. They’ll Let You Guest Post If you’re going to do a crowdfunding project, you have to get ready to write. A lot! Sure, as an author you know what it’s like to chain yourself to the keyboard, but you’ll most likely have to put your own literary endeavors aside as you promote yourself with guest posts across the blogosphere. Before you launch your project, you’ll want to make sure that you have a collection of unique ideas that you can write up for the bloggers on your list. New takes on the art of writing ...

Dear Readers, It's a lovely thing to be able to write a thank you note and have it reach thousands of people in an instant. No matter how long I use the Internet, I don't think I'll ever quite get used to this amazing tool and the freedom it represents to me. When I first starting writing, I used a pencil. I was a child. In my teen years, I learned to type... on a manual typewriter, and it was a miracle indeed when I got my first electric typewriter with an auto-correct ribbon. Years later, I can't begin to tell you how rich I felt to have my own computer with printer and copier. But the online communications with my computer... that is what I'm most grateful for and for many reasons. Half a dozen years ago, my husband and I had an opportunity to move to a small rural town, and I decided then and there, I would focus on my writing. I have always written my way through life, but in a secondary way to my art career. I would leave the brushes for a time, and focu...

Less than a year ago, I appeared on this site and audaciously banged the drum for my debut novel, 600 Hours of Edward . It was the first stop of a hastily thrown-together blog book tour, and as I look back on it, I realize that “hastily thrown-together” is an apt descriptor for much of my promotional efforts in those early days of the novel’s emergence. So here I am, back in this cozy seat as I approach the January 2011 release of my second novel, The Summer Son . I’ve learned a lot about promotional work in the past several months – enough to know that I still have much more to learn. Here’s a short list of what I’m doing better this time around: 1. I have a much more robust, focused blog book tour planned: 10 stops instead of seven, at sites with established readerships that are good bets to be interested in my book. 2. I’m taking advantage of a slower rollout: Lining up blurbs, putting together mailing lists for ARCs, seeing if some buzz can be ignited. The current ...

Let me just set one thing straight right here and now -- I am NOT a blogger. I am a writer who chooses to publish little stories using a program used by bloggers. But that does NOT make me a blogger. I am NOT a blogger! A "blogger" is a person who writes about how they feel, what they think, how they perceive the world, how they think others perceive how they perceive the world, and a fair amount of angst-filled paragraphs that other bloggers read, make comments about, and then link to, Tweet about, Digg up, and so on and so on, using a blogging "platform" because that's a whole lot easier to do than to create a website from scratch using HTML. I am not a blogger! Bloggers enjoy sharing their inner-most feelings with total strangers; they describe the minutia of their every-day life as if the rest of us don't have our own minutia; they rant and rave about this subject and that subject; and then they ask how YOU feel about the matter, please leave a ...

Daily writing adds up in more ways than one. Not only does your word count increase, but so does your skill. All writing matters, and this includes blogging. Because blogging is instantly public, it might be more important in some aspects than our journals or more serious writing, like a novel-in-process. If you do it regularly, it eventually blossoms into a large body of work. So what happens when your blog disappears? It happened to our fellow editor, Marvin Wilson, just last week. Blogger killed not one, but two of his blogs, sites in which he’d invested an enormous amount of time and energy. Gone with the wind. Just like that. Poof. No exclamation given. There are no guarantees that platforms like Blogger or WordPress will guard the safety of your creative work. You have to take precautions yourself. I protect my writing by drafting in an MSWord file, and then copying and pasting to the HTML window of a new post in Blogger. This way, I have all my writing accumulated and saved on m...