on Publishing … and Other Forms of Insanity:

This June there are more than five dozen free writing contests for short fiction, novels, poetry, CNF, nonfiction, and plays.

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Prizes range from $100,000 to publication.

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None charge entry fees.

Get Full Details HERE

Ever sat down to write a piece of text and found yourself stuck on whether to use effect or affect? You’re not the only one!

In fact, learning the difference between affect vs effect is one of the most common questions people have, which is understandable seeing as they can both be verbs and nouns, and their meanings can overlap—triple threat!

Continue reading HERE

on Writer Beware:

Copyright, literally, is “the right to copy.” It guarantees the authors of creative works–including books,  artworks, films, recordings, and photographs–the exclusive right to allow others to copy and distribute the work, by whatever means and in whatever media currently exist. It also prohibits copying and distributing without the author’s permission, and includes moral rights: the right of attribution (the right to be named as the creator of the work) and the right of integrity (the right to control changes to the work).

In countries that are signatory to the Berne Convention,, the international source for copyright law (including the USA, Canada, the UK, Europe, and  many other countries), you own copyright, automatically, as soon your work is fixed in tangible form–i.e., the minute you write the words. Your ownership extends beyond your death–between 50 and 70 years, depending on which country you’re in.

Contained within 

If you’ve never used Microsoft Word’s Track Changes feature before, the idea of getting your manuscript back from an editor filled with all sorts of lines and squiggles you have to do something to in order to keep your novel from plummeting precipitously through a fiery ring of digital destruction and disappearing into the black maw of—

Whoa, there. Seriously, Track Changes isn’t that terrifying. Let’s take this one step at a time.

BUT FIRST—WHAT NOT TO DO: Don’t try to revise your manuscript by opening the file with tracked changes and beginning to click through it one edit or comment at a time. A typical full-length edited manuscript contains between 10,000 and 30,000 revisions—that’s right, tens of thousands. Clicking through each one is a sure path to wasted time, hard liquor, and seething regret.

Don’t try to manually transfer or key in the changes from the edited manuscript…

For me, writing a teenage character was my first attempt at writing. I could relate to teens as I was fast approaching that age. The teens in my world didn’t deal with a world like we see now. Oh, no. It was sort of a mixture of one of those apocalyptic/survival stories. There were dinosaurs as well as things the government had let off (hey, it was the eighties, after all, and the Cold War was fresh on our minds), and of course, instead of adults being in charge of things: the teens were the leads.

Crazy world, huh? Well, it was filled with all my favorite things at the time. And I admit, heavily influenced by the shows I watched on TV. I didn’t realize it at the time but on that training ground as I think of it now: I was learning to blend things together. Genres crossed…