Month: May 2013
Back in December we received a note from author Kim Boykin, whose debut novel The Wisdom of Hair was set to release in March. We book WU guest slots far in advance, and had to let her know that we would’t be able to offer anything in March, however something Kim said to us sparked another idea. She spent a good deal of her own money on promotional opportunities offered through the Brenda Novak Auction last year–opportunities that have and will help her to market The Wisdom of Hair. The Brenda Novak auction, which raises money for diabetes research and has become very popular among all in the writing community, was kicking off again in May. Maybe there would be an opportunity to talk about it then?
Absolutely.
Said Kim:
I believe writers make a difference just by telling stories. Winning the right item for your writing on Brenda Novak’s Auction For Diabetes Research can go a long way toward advancing your publishing career AND go a long way towards saving lives.
Last year, Kim came away with many useful wins, including an AUTHORBUZZ Package from Author M.J. Rose and more. (She’ll tell you more about them below.) Wonderful buys, and it’s a win-win-win for Kim as the cause hits close to home. She said:
Both of my husbands parents are diabetic and my grandmother was too. Brenda Novak’s son is 15 and insulin dependent, it’s a cause close to many hearts.”
You can learn more about Kim and The Wisdom of Hair on her website and blog, and by following her on Facebook and Twitter. Enjoy, and bid, WU’ers; this is a great cause.
Doubling Down
Recently, I told a group of aspiring authors that there’s never been a better time to be a writer, and it’s true. Even with traditional publishers still trying to figure out the industry and Amazon’s continued march toward domination, I believe this is the best time in the history of storytelling to get your story out.
As a novelist, I thought nabbing a publishing contract would be the hardest part of the process. I was wrong. Whether it’s your first or your fifty-first, getting your book noticed today is like meeting a blind date at a massive cocktail party in the middle of Times Square and telling him to look for the girl in the little black dress.
So, what’s a traditionally published or self-published author to do? Coming from a marketing background, I looked for ways to maximize the advertising and promotions budget I set for myself and found bestselling author Brenda Novak’s Annual Online Auction For Diabetes Research.
Read MoreAny caption suggestions? Please post below in the comments section – please post one caption at a time, and let someone else post a comment before posting another. Vote for the caption(s) you like by clicking on “Like.” Caption suggestion with the most Likes by Sat. May 18th gets a selection of writer-focused greeting cards from my Zazzle shop. I reserve the right to veto a caption if I consider it inappropriate or offensive.
My recent exciting news: I have a two-book illustration deal with Random House Children’s Books! Details here. Thanks to all of you, especially Writer Unboxed, for your continuing support of my illustrations.
Read More
On a recent flight to Dallas, I read a short biography of Thomas Edison put out by Time Magazine that I’d bought at an airport kiosk. I learned that Edison’s first invention was a commercial failure. He invented a vote tabulator so that votes could be counted efficiently and quickly. When he took the invention to politicians, he realized that the losing side wanted a slow head count so that they could gather support; and at some point or another, every politician is on the losing side of a vote. No one wanted it.
And so Edison decided he would never invent another product that didn’t have a built-in demand.
When I first started out, I would have never applied this lesson to writing. In fact, I would have seen this kind of thinking to be sell-out thinking, and I’d have street-fought against it thuggishly.
I believed in writing what I now call heart work. I think most novelists have heart work – the things they must write because they’re bound up in the pistons of the heart itself. It’s part-exorcism, part-translating-the-senseless-world — part-respiration, breathing in some organically necessary way.
I’ve written a lot of my heart work, that stuff that needed out, but, at a certain point in my career – and it wasn’t a dramatic shift, it was a slow dawning – I realized that I’d written much of the stuff I needed to write, for my own sake, and I started to think about what readers needed and wanted to read. The novel as a collaboration between writer and reader – the incredible translation of the worlds I’ve created then inked on a page that then become images in the reader’s mind, that fascination took hold. I wanted to collaborate. I wanted to be read.
Read MoreToday’s guest is business writer and editor Tom Bentley. Tom is a published journalist and essayist (300+ articles), and the author of a short story collection, Flowering and Other Stories, published last spring by AuthorMike Ink. His 1999 short story, All That Glitters, won the National Steinbeck Center’s short story contest, and he has won many other nonfiction and fiction awards and contests. Check out his recent “Why I Write” post on the popular Men With Pens blog. We were thrilled that Tom agreed to guest post with WU to talk about one of the writer’s most important (and most misunderstood) tools: punctuation. When we asked him why he wanted to write a post about punctuation, he said:
Because good punctuation has always made me emotional. And because BAD punctuation has always made me emotional. Also, I’ve heard that there’s a campaign to get rid of the apostrophe. These Bolsheviks must be hunted down!
Follow Tom on his twitter @bentguy1 or his blog. Take it away, Tom!
Take a Punctuation Mark Out to Lunch
A comma, a period and a semicolon walk into a bar … oh, wait! I can’t finish the joke; I forget how it’s punctuated. Wow, tough crowd. But punctuation’s no joke, my friends—each punctuation mark has a grave (or acute) purpose: sometimes bearing a serious slant, sometimes swinging a strong, straight shoulder to torque the weight of words through thought rivers. Think of the cymbal crash of the exclamation point, the yearning intrigue of the question mark, the potential hidden menace of the semicolon.
But behind the sober, workaday faces of those little bits of pause and check, it’s not so black and white. Every punctuation mark has its own personality, much more idiosyncratic than that of a bland worker wielding the traffic signals of sentence flow. Like any of us, they appreciate the anonymity of a job well done, but at the same time, they don’t mind letting on that there’s a purple sash under the white cotton shirt.
Read MoreDo you spring clean? Do you preserve peaches in the summer or freeze apple pies in October? Did you move a tassel from one side of your graduation cap to another? Have you danced at your daughter’s wedding? Have you walked out of the oncologist’s office with a clean bill of health, cancer free? Do you write New Year’s resolutions?
If you have done any of those things then you’ve probably experienced the feeling of starting anew, moving from one season to another, beginning a new phase. It’s a good, clean slate feeling. You’re at the top of a ski trail, nothing but untouched powder on the run below. It’s exciting. It’s scary. You wouldn’t miss it for anything because, man, in this moment you’re completely alive.
Beginnings and endings are a lot alike. They’re a pivot, a leap, a weightless suspension that lasts a second but feels like it could go on forever. It’s a moment you’ll never forget yet is gone too soon.
So, when is the right moment in a protagonist’s experience to start his or her story? And when does that story truly end? If a story is about change, then the story begins with the protagonist’s apprehension that change is underway. By the same token the story has ended when that change has happened, both outside and in.
Authors often open with a dramatic event and end with a visual image. That’s fine but such choices don’t necessarily capture the feeling we have of arriving at defining moments in our lives.
Here’s a method for finding alternate opening and closing moments for your work in progress:
Read More- « Previous
- 1
- 2
- 3
