The Back Page Of My Friends Book

I thought that I would show off the back page summary of my friends book, "The Book of Mengel." It's pretty awesome fantasy story. If you like that sort of thing, you should check it out. It's available only on the Kindle as an E-Book right now. I think he is working on other formats though.

An Orc army, five thousand strong, is on the war path. Their target: the Moorland Wizards Castle. The army will arrive in seven days.

The headmaster of the Moorland Wizards, Beltharius, detects the marching army several days out from the castle. He knows it’s futile fighting such a large army on their own and suspects that he knows of the one person who might be able to prevent the total massacre of the wizards. Thus he sends Kendra Filligree, the lost love of Tavis Brantin, to lure him back to the castle.

Tavis is bitter over being forced to leave the castle nine years earlier and vows never to return. Only now, the woman he loved has re-entered his life and is asking him to return to the castle. Reluctantly, not wanting to lose Kendra again, he returns to the castle with her, unaware that he is being used to help the fate of the Wizards.

Tavis is unknowingly the descendant of the greatest Druid to ever walk the land. The headmaster knows that a druid’s power over nature is a massive power, the likes no wizard could ever hope to attain, and Tavis would be the sword edge the wizards need to clash with and destroy their enemy. He has only to decipher the Book of Mengel to channel the druidic powers he needs.

Tavis is able to read the Book of Mengel, thus learning how to control nature and its power, while slowly transforming into the New Druid. In his studies, Tavis also learns more about himself, and the imbalance of man and nature, yet struggles with helping the Moorland Wizards or turning his back and leaving them to fate for banning him years earlier.

Getting the Writing Done July 24th

I'm plugging away at some freelance writing this morning. Although, I'm thinking about my fictional book that I'm working on as well. I have the first draft done and now it's time to start looking at revising.
But for right now, I have to work on a project for a client, writing articles for their website. It's not the most ideal work I would do, but hey, I'm getting paid to write, so that's good.s
Recently, I have had a bit of luck writing for a local newspaper. I'm slowly getting some gigs from them, but what I'm really waiting for is a response to some of the query letters that I've sent out to magazine editors. I haven't heard back from any yet. Being new at this, I don't really know if it does take awhile, like many weeks, to hear back, or if my queries have gone in the trash.

Oh well, for now I've got my butt in the chair and I'm writing. I hope you all are getting your butt's in your chairs. 

Cheers.

The Time Seems Right for E-Publishing

I’ve been reading a lot of author sites that are starting to tout the e-publishing venue. Many of these authors have been, or are currently, being published through the big time publishers. I’m noticing a trend however. Many of these authors are saying the e-publishing is the new way to go. I’ve read some articles from these authors and some stuff I’ve learned after doing some research on my own and I have to say that e-publishing certainly does sound enticing. I’ve summed up a few of the reasons that these writers are leaning the way they are.

 You get to keep creative control of all the work that you do: So this means that not only do you not have to bow down to what your publisher thinks is a good idea, based off some chart with recent numbers on it, you can write in your own style and keep all the creative control.  

The big money issue: The big money issue is actually several. First, you don’t have to worry about making your advance versus sales. Granted you don’t get an advance when you are writing for yourself, without a contract, but that also means that you will garner almost all of the revenue generated. The large publishers pay royalties twice a year, that’s it. With e-publishing, most sites will pay you each month. Some of these authors have also stated that they sometimes don’t receive the royalties they are due, at all. Thinking about the book advance also brings up the thoughts of not selling enough books that the publisher makes a profit. That means you really only have the advance to show for all the time you took to write your book. Many times a publisher will drop you like a hot brick if you don’t meet the expectations in terms of sales. That will make it very difficult for you to get back in with any publisher, as you will likely be known as the author whose sales didn’t pay out the advance. By e-publishing you take charge of your income. You get to decide how much your book will sell for, and don’t have to worry about making up the advance that was given to you.  

Promotion: With e-publishing, you do have to promote your own work. This isn’t really much different from promoting your book that is put out by a publisher. Unless you are the next up and coming New York Times Bestseller, than the amount of promotion the publisher actually creates is minimal. In fact, most agents and publishers expect you to already have a promotional scheme in the works, or has been created already. They call this “A Platform.” I’m not sure if I’m going to be going on the e-publishing band wagon just yet. However, I can see that this option is looking better and better as our technology grows.

 What do you think?

Kindle Store: The Book of Mengel

My good friend, M.D. Jake, has just finished his novel, "The Book of Mengel." It's the first in a series of the "Druid Cycle." Good story, so go to Kindle, look it up, and buy it!

Freelance Writing for Self Esteem

I've been doing some freelance writing lately for some magazines. It's a nice change to have editors want to see my work. The agents don't seem to be too interested at the moment. Anyway, I just had a thought that if you feel like you need some validation for all the hard work that you are putting in - you should try doing some freelance writing when you can...if you have the time that is. It's been working for me. Give it a try; it might help.

Question and Answer in person (sort of)

I was thinking about the idea of having a skype conversation with people from anywhere and everywhere. We would of course be talking about writing, writing techniques, how to get published and all that sort of goodness.

I am wondering how many people would be interested? Leave a comment below. That way I can see if there is enough interest to take time away from writing to spend time talking about writing.

Thanks and looking forward to hearing from you!

I've been away, but now I'm back

Hi everyone. I've been away writing lots of things, but not writing the things that I should be here. I plan on getting back into the writing here with more tips and ideas as well as some video of writing tips and ways to help you achieve your publishing goals.
Leave me a comment below as to what you would like to see in a video and I will get right on it.

Five Tips To Writing A Better Fantasy Novel

This article will show you some tips on how to write a better fantasy novel. If you’ve never written a book before, don’t think that it is too daunting of a task. On the other hand you should know that the best way to finish writing a book is to keep at it every day, and once started don’t stop until it’s done. Here are some ideas that should help you stay on track with writing your fantasy novel.

1. Make sure you know the world you are writing about.

This is one of the first places that people get strung up. You need to know what your fantasy world is like. If you can’t describe what the vegetation and trees are like in your world, you will have a hard time crafting a story that is very lifelike.

A good way to go about this is to take the time to think about your fantasy world. What is the landscape like there? What sort of creatures inhabit it? Are there any extremely different terrain features from the real world that would help make this world stand out? Think about yourself as a world builder when you are writing your fantasy novel.

2. What political factions are there?

A great way to bring more intrigue and plot lines into your fantasy story is to introduce opposing political or religious factions. Some questions to ask are: Who is the ruler of the land? Do people like him/her? Are there people who want to rule the land? What is the relation of this country to that of the other countries surrounding it?

3. Know your characters.

Often in writing text there is the section regarding the characters of the book. They often want you to write a character sketch of the person. This often doesn’t work that well for every writer. In some cases it is better to get a few chapters under your belt and see how the characters react to situations. Then go back and make notes about your characters.

In a fantasy novel, there are plenty of times where the characters have varying physical or mental qualities that are not found in the real world. This sort of attribute needs to be well thought out in order for it to become convincing to the reader. A good course of action is to have a hindrance added to a special quality that would seem to give the character an advantage over others in the story. This lends to the character being a bit more believable and is a great opportunity to add sub-plots into the story.

4. Magic

If you have any sort of magic system introduced to your fantasy world you need to do your homework here. First, think about the magic system and how it affects the world and how it affects the individual. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when introducing magic into your fantasy writing.

What are the qualities of the magic system? Can anyone have magical abilities? What about animals and humanoids? How does the average person in the world react to magic?

5. Read the classics.

It is a great idea to have read the classics before venturing out and writing your own fantasy novel. The biggest reason for this, is that you will know what sort of things have written about in the past and it will save you from becoming a poor repeat. In addition, by reading the works of those such as Tolkien, Wiess & Hickman, and more, you will come to appreciate just how tightly woven the characters and world come together and how they react with and against each other.

Writing a fantasy novel has its great advantages- you can make anything up- however, you have to be more calculated with your writing to make it believable. Click on the link provided to learn more on how to better your writing

Five Steps To A Tighter Plot

For most people, writing isn’t really that hard. However, writing a novel and coming up with a believable plot is something else entirely. It often amazes me how people who have never written much of anything before, can think that they should be able to just sit down and write. Just because someone knows how to take medicine for a headache doesn’t mean that they should assume that they can now be a doctor. Both professions take time to learn.

It’s possible to learn how to write a novel, and even a great novel, if you are willing to put in the time and hard work. This is where Five Steps to a Tighter Plot, will be able to help you. But remember, the two most important aspects to becoming a published writer, is to read a lot and to write a lot. Every novelist will tell you this; there is no shortcut.

Step One: Think about the villain first. It’s often easier to think about what the bad guy is going to do before thinking about the protagonist. When coming up with a tight plot, there has to be the element of risk and by thinking about the risk and dangers first will make it easier to develop the plot.

Step Two: Brainstorming the plot is crucial before writing anything. Think about anything and everything that you can, no matter how ridiculous you may think it is. Often, a nugget of a great idea can be found in the most insane ideas.

Step Three: Once you have as many ideas as you can think of for the plotline, weed out the ones that aren’t going anywhere. You will be able to tell this by the plot line ideas that don’t stimulate other ideas. They just sort of lie there on the screen or paper and lack any sort of creative imagery. Put those to the side for now, so when you are making up your plot you can look back to any of these discarded ideas to help further develop your plot, if they happen to mesh well, or a little, with what you have so far.

Step Four: Detail the plot ideas that you’ve created. Think about what sort of ramifications are going to come from the bad guy doing this or that. How will that affect the main character and those he or she cares about? What would be even worse? Take that thought and twist it even more to make your plot tighter and more compelling than before.

Step Five: Now this is where you start to think about your main character. They are usually going to react to any situation. Think about it, they are going along through life without a care in the world until a problem or danger present themselves. Without this crucial element to the designing of plot, you don’t have much of a story. This is where you’re going to plug in your protagonist and start to strengthen the plot and tighten the plot to make sure that the whole novel is as concise, compelling, and page turning as possible.

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Once again...getting back to it!

So once again, I'm getting back down to it. I know...I know. It's been awhile and I haven't written a thing. Well, I've got good reason. (At least I think so). I've been putting the finishing touches on my fantasy book and then spent weeks working on the query letter to get it just right.

And an agent is interested in my book. I'm waiting to hear back from them, but they said my query sounded very interesting and they would like to take a look at the first three chapters. Of course, I was thrilled to hear this. It's not everyday that I get the attention of an agent.

So now that I'm on to working on a new book and waiting to hear back, I have time again to devote to my experiences with writing and how I go about this whacky process. I've learned a few things since finishing my book and I plan on sharing them soon.

In the meantime, if you have specific questions about the writing process, leave a comment and I will answer with how I go about this or that. Thanks for reading and keep on writing!

Create your own ebooks and make money now.

I just finished reading a great book on how to create and market your own ebooks. It is geared more towards those that are looking to either make a little extra income online, or those who really want to start up an internet business...but they both have one thing in commen-you should like to write.

I loved this and thought it might be worth sharing here. I'm probably going to give it a shot. Heck, I might even make it a goal that I will write down and shoot to finish a first draft of by the end of the month. Maybe I will start bringing in an income with this ebook product that's all my own. How fun!

You can find out more info here if you're interested. Click Here

Creating a Plot for a Novel

There really is no magical way that authors come up with their plots. To be sure, they all have their way of plotting their novels, but no one way is the right way. The right way is what works for you. That's easy enough to say though. But what if you don't know what your way of plotting a novel is yet? Here are a few things that I do for short stories and novels.

First, I would start brainstorming scenes that I would want to write. This will get the juices flowing and get me thinking about different aspects of the story. For example, say I'm writing a story about a detective who is looking for a murderer. I'm going to start writing on paper, which is how I do my best thinking, scenes that I'm excited about now. This would be roughly one to two sentences. Nothing elaborate here in my notes, just something that I will remember for when I'm ready to start working on the outline.

So I have my detective and he is in an alley. He sees a few kids, probably dealing drugs. What does he do? Is he the type that wouldn't be concerned with this since it isn't his main priority right now, or would he nab the kids to teach them a lesson?

See how thinking through scenes lends to asking questions. It can be questions concerning the characters, the world that they live in, the motivations for those involved in the story and it could lead to other scenes and ideas for the overall plot of the story.

Okay, so now you have some scenes, but scenes alone don't make a plot. What's next?

Second, is looping all these scenes together, and you may find that after developing so many scenes that some are better then others, or they take off in a direction that wasn't necessarily where you had planned to go. This is okay. Go with it for now. This time is all about brainstorming and coming up with ideas for scenes and plots; you just never know where the next idea is going to come from so don't stiffle yourself.

If after you have created a bunch of scenes and you still haven't figured out a strong plot, then put it down for awhile. I find that my subconsious will actually do a lot of the work for me when I'm off doing something else. I know...it sounds a little cliched to do this, but trust me it will work.

Try working on a different project. If your brainstorming this idea do something unrelated like editing a different story. In time, something will spark in your imagination that will give you the 'Aha!' moment that you have been waiting for that will tie your whole novel together.

Good luck on plotting your novel and I hope this blog helped.

New Year and Lots of Writing To Get Done

It's been a long time since I've updated this blog. Sorry about that to those who have read this in the past. I had been busy working on several fiction short stories and a fantasy book that is just about finished. It's taken the better part of three years to get the book right, and it is a long...long book.

I hope to be able to provide more information here about writing in various areas such as web writing, fiction, non-fiction, and short stories. I've had experience in all these areas and make money online from the web writing, non-fiction and short stories. Hopefully soon, I will be able to add 'Novelist' to this list.

Stay tuned. In the next few days there will be new info added at least one a week.
Cheers and get back to writing!

Sold Out

I am proud to say that the Making Money Online book is now sold out. Sorry to those who missed out. More books and pdf's on writing are soon to follow.

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Setting up your paypal account so you can receive payments.
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Blogging your way to big bucks.
Where to find the writing jobs now and start writing today.
How to make enough money to write from home full time.
How to improve your writing so you can charge more.

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How to spark creativity

Do you remember the last time you had that great idea?
In a flash, you had the whole story laid out in front of you and your mind's eye.
But now you're looking at a new story and not sure where to go. Below are a few ideas on how to get started with a new story in how to spark your creativity for writing a new short story where the beginnings of a new novel.

Try jotting down ideas on a piece of paper. This is similar to what some people call mind mapping. Start in the center of the paper with one idea, usually a sentence. Draw a circle around that one sentence and start brainstorming ideas off of that. Draw lines from the first idea to the second idea, see how they relate. Possibly, there will be offshoots of your first or second circle. This is great! This is what you want. You want to have many ideas related to each other. Some of these ideas may be the main storyline for your story, while others will be subplots for the story. And some of those ideas will go off on tangents and might not be good for the story and save them anyway, you might need them later for a different story.

Many writers take a drive to clear their minds. They may take a mini recorder with them while driving as the silence and the scenes spur creativity.

Some writers like to sit in coffee shops and observe others which gives some great insight into characters and will give them great ideas for a character driven story.

The most important thing to remember here is that you may have to take a step away from your computer or your journal and get outside of your normal thinking patterns to come up with great stories.

How to write through the middle of your book

For many people, starting and ending a novel is the easier part of writing. That is, if there really is an easy part to writing a novel! However, the middle of the book is where things start to bog down for many writers. I know I have had my share of slogging through the marshy wetlands of the second act.

So how do you get through writing the middle of your book?

I think it all boils down to having a good idea of what the story is about. If you have a solid story line, you should be able to work from that. Think about the character motivations, which should follow along with the story line. Then expand out from there.

What you are trying to achieve here are smaller sub plots to fill in the gaps when the main story line is slogging down and you don't know where to go with it quite yet. Here are a few things to think about.

What does character x want out of life?
What is their main passion?
Do they want to improve something in their life?

Aside from the main story line, what does x want to achieve within the context of this story.
As you can see, having a healthy idea of what and who your character is all about will benefit you greatly when trying to come up with sub plots.

To sum up: When the story seems to slow down, shift gears and punch it up with a sub plot. Just be sure to tie up this sub plot somewhere before the end of the book.

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For Plots, think about what the bad guy would do.

If you'r stuck somewhere in the middle of your book and you don't know where to go. Or if you are looking to beef up your word count as we get into the middle of NaNo, you can try this for figuring out where to go with your sub plots and developing your sub plots.
In addition, I use this to figure out the main plot line of my story.
I start with the motivations of my bad guy and figure out why he does what he does and what he hopes to gain. Then I go about figuring out how he would accomplish what he wants to achieve.
This is a great way to 1. Figure out your subplots by taking the angle of the antagonist and 2. You can use this to figure out what you're antagonist is going to do and then reverse this so that you now know what your protagonist has to do.
It's worked for me and hopefully it will work for you.
If you don't understand this, or want to me to expand on this shoot me an email at www.popwebcity@hotmail.com.
I will try to respond to everyone just after I get my 1,667 words in for the day.

NaNo Wrimo Month

It's almost the middle of Nano Wrimo and hopefully everyone is going along well with their writing. I will be posting some ways to help you kick start your creativity for the middle of your book.
Hopefully, this will help you get to the 100,000k mark.


Just kidding...the 50K mark. Stay tuned.