Leaping Into Failure: Chances Are You’ll Reach Excellence

Sometimes we have to hear it from someone else.  We know the facts, but they always seem to apply to someone else.  Someone else can write a book, find an energetic, nurturing agent, and have multiple high profile publishers engaged in a six-figure auction for the right to bring your book to the world. But […]

Revealing Ourselves: Writers Take Risks

So, I didn’t win, or even place, in Jeff’s Goins’ You Are a Writer contest.  But that doesn’t matter.  What matters is that I was one of 138 writers who publicly stood up and declared our innermost identities.  Isn’t that the most important thing?  That we claim our talents and make use of them – […]

Claim It, Shout It: I Am A Writer!

Is yours the only house on the block with a window still lit at 2:00 a.m.?  If that light were not casting a golden glow across your backyard when he comes home from swing shift, would the deputy sheriff living next-door break down the door to see if you are lying in a pool of […]

Telling Tales: Surrounded by Hans’ and Grimm’s Characters

Continuing with the theme of the last post, I’ve been considering the popularity of the TV shows Grimm and Once Upon A Time.  Both were renewed for a second season and Once Upon A Time is one of ABC’s top shows. Recently, author Mercedes Lackey retold the popular fairy tales of our youth in a […]

Re-Imagining Characters: Finding Familiar Faces in New Places

It was exciting to watch the Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus Kickstarter counter climb from around 57% funding to 147% in the last 50 hours of the drive.  With the additional monies, Richard Monson-Haefel hopes to bring the second book of the series, Steampunk Holmes: Frankenstein (working title) to readers a year earlier than […]

Helping Shape a New Concept for Books: Final Hours of the Steampunk Holmes Kickstarter Campaign

How do you best absorb information? Are you a hands-on person, needing to disassemble an engine on the workbench in order to understand how it works? Do you reach greater understanding when you hear the mechanic describe the flow of fuel through the injector to the engine? Or, do you want to see the directions […]