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10 Ways to be Successful: Hacking It
I thought I would throw out some of my thoughts today about how you become good at something, and how you become successful with it, because I’m not sure everyone out there understands this. I often get a lot of email from people wanting to become good at magick, or writing, or some other skill, but they don’t know how…
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Truths About Self-Publishing #writing #indieauthor
I recently had the unfortunate opportunity to run across another “old timer” who is under the erroneous assumption that traditionally published = better authors and better quality books. This antiquated idea is still perpetuated by those who make their living, somehow, through the big-five, or other large presses. They’ve likely been told by a publisher representative, agent, old-school author, or…
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The Worst Writing Advice
A friend recently asked, “You’ve given a lot of writing advice over the years, but what’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever been given?” I actually had to sit down and think about this because most of the writing advice I’ve actually taken to heart over the years came from long-time professionals who have always been honest and sometimes even bitter…
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Find the Right Community
Online writing communities can be vast oceans difficult to navigate if you’re new to the scene. The wrong community can cause aspiring writers to give up, while the right community can help nurture a writer’s creativity, or boost them toward publication. The first question you want to ask yourself is, “What are my long term goals?” If you love writing…
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Relax, it’s only fiction…
You know how there’s always that one person who just doesn’t get it? Well, sometimes this happens with readers, too. With my OTS series, I can’t begin to tell you how many people think the novels are actually autobiographical. More than once I’ve had people approach me and ask if I know Senator XXX, or this or that actor. I’ve…
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Immersion
Immersion. It’s one of those things I’ve always done before writing anything non-fiction. It’s also what I try to do when I’m writing fiction. Of course it means different things depending on what I’m writing. For example, with non-fiction, I certainly don’t know everything. I never will as I’m forever a student. It was Socrates who said that admitting one’s…
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The Slump at The End
As the author of over 10 NF titles and over 7 novels I’ve come to learn a thing or two about writing books. The first thing I’ve learned is that no two books, for me at least, are alike. While I rarely struggle with the type of non-fiction I write, since that’s just outright sharing information and sharing personal experience…
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A Malkuth of Me, business of writing, craft, Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour, NaNoWriMo, novels, the writing life
Breaking the Block
One of the most common questions I get is how to break writer’s block. I suppose I get this question a lot because I’m one of those writers who’s rather prolific. My other writer friends watch me produce book after book and wonder how the heck I do it. Truthfully, I wasn’t always this way. I labored over my first novel…
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I Could Probably Carry About 20 Books + My Kindle
Sorry for the title (which would make sense if this was about reading), but I didn’t want to title it, “My Strengths As A Writer” because it sounds like one of those back-to-school reports we used to have to write in elementary school. “What I Did During Summer Vacation.” So what are my greatest writing strengths? I’d have to say…
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The Myth of Perfection (The Pedantic Writer)
When I met Kaylyn* I had no idea she was a writer. She was one of those people who had a precise, perhaps overly anal retentive, vocabulary. In that I mean she was one of those folks who used so many three to four syllable words in a sentence that the meaning of what she was trying to say got…