First Word

Here are some tips to improve your novel:   Pacing 101 -keep your prose moving by not getting caught up in redundant techniques. For example, I laughed with my author today that only so many facial expressions are available in the repertoire of descriptive opportunities. She puzzled on the comment. I chuckled, "Well, you can only 'smile, grin or frown' so many times before it's repetitious and unnecessary to keep saying it. When you take out what I'll call "the extended version of dialog" you'll notice something interesting-suddenly, your story is moving much faster. When trying to create the famous "page-turner" effect you'll want to expeditiously tell your story. Trim the fat, make it lean, but don't make it skinny (and that's a whole other tip in and of itself).   Redundancy, Redundancy What's Your 'Abundancy'? You'll notice a little play on School House Rock here (for those of you youngst...

When I started the process to promote California Girl Chronicles , I was swimming in a new area (for me as an author). It is my first novel. I've written three non-fiction books and hundreds of magazine articles. I am learning some powerful and amazing lessons I want to share with other authors, writers and readers. When the reviews began posting on Amazon, I had two very malicious reviews post initially about the book not only saying some very nasty things about my talents, but also questioning the authenticity of the other positive reviews as genuine, because the supposition was this book is so bad how could anyone say anything great about it? Well, these hateful individuals didn't even put their names on their spew, which of course, led me to question their motivations. None the less, I took the opportunity to reflect on the book and since I was ready to do another print run, I seized on the idea to strengthen the book not because two haters said I should, but because I beli...