How Can You Tell If Your Work is Good?

This morning, I ran across what has to be the single most objectively bad book cover I’ve ever seen in my life. Someone I follow retweeted it to help out the author. And even at the ass crack of dawn with an hour and five minutes of sleep (an actual Fitbit reading, not hyperbole) I

Reusing Old Posts By Subject

One of the thoughts that flutters through my head from time to time is re-posting, or cross-posting content from the blog to other platforms. I’m always running into plugins that promise to do that for me. I use one, actually, to tweet each post, and maybe add it to Google Plus. (Because the integration was

Writer’s Business Cards

A while back, I had business cards made up. They’re not too bad. The Vista Print special for the day. Nothing that took a designer to build, but not exactly shabby, either. They focused more on my website than on me as a writer, which is okay, I guess. I haven’t settled on a pen

Where to List Random Bits of Opinion, and Disastrous Art Projects

I don’t usually write for children, so I don’t usually blog about children, and I don’t usually blog about education. But, every now and then, an opinion slips out. I don’t even know why I should get to have an opinion. I did my turn teaching, substituting, and wearing the dog costume in the children’s

Religion as A Marketing Technique

Yesterday, I was reading an author’s biography.  Her biography was a list of attributes. You know the kind. Dinosaur wrangler, Rockstar, and Mail-order Accountant Ethel Hergenmeier lives in Florida with her husband, her potted plants, and three small children whose parents refuse to take them back. (This was the blog-based, and probably unofficial biography, by

Trigger Warnings for the Modern Reader

The first time I ran into the idea of trigger warnings, I was working on revising my first (and eternally unpublished) novel, and writing a second (or third, or fourth, or fifteenth). I was on the NaNoWriMo forums, talking to people I didn’t know particularly well, whose names I no longer remember, and who were

Safety, Common Sense, and Selling Books

So, you already know I was on a mini-vacay last week. I needed that. The stress of stress would have eaten me alive, if I hadn’t gotten out. Nothing quite like grabbing a friend, ditching real life, and hitting a neighboring state. And, as it turns out, there was another writer in the motel. It

Lagniappes, Giveaways, and Finding YOUR Fans

I love it when people give me free books. Aside from the obvious–someone is giving you a free book–it’s a great way to get past all those unconscious biases and read something completely out of your comfort zone and find something you wouldn’t pick up on your own. The first strangers I remember handing out

Glitches, Progress Reports, and The Dreaded Day Job

For some reason, the blog hasn’t been automatically approving comments. All the right check boxes are checked, and some of the “please moderate” comments are definitely from people I know, and who comment all the time, but… they’re still getting flagged. I’m working on that. I’m adding two new pages, today. The first one is

Momentum on the Internet; or, I Choose To Celebrate

I’m about ten views away from hitting my 5,000 view milestone with this blog. That’s taken me two years–give or take–but the first year was pretty much practice.  For the first year, or so, I only posted very sporadically. I was trying to post the Lepterians  novel, and the total number of posts was probably

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