Newsletter 039 – May 26, 2023 Hi, Quick Update: The first draft of Flood and Fire is now about 26,000 words, but far from complete. I’m working on it a couple of hours a day, in between video training on some of the software I’ll talk about below. I usually lose a quarter of the …
Newsletter 037 – April 28, 2023 Hi, Note: (4-29-2023) The winner of a free autographed print copy of Jagged Man is Diana Hardt. When the book is republished (hopefully later this year) she will get one of the first copies of it. Congratulations, Diana. The newsletter this time is just a brief (semi-mild) rant about …
Newsletter 034 – March 10, 2023 Hi, I’m still working on my novella, Flood and Fire, and I’ll keep you updated on its progress (which is currently sloth slow), but today I wanted to talk about my marketing campaign for If a Butterfly. Self-published authors are often told there are a certain few things they …
Newsletter 033 – February 24, 2023 Hi, In the last newsletter I talked about applying for a writing residency in Cove Park, Scotland. I didn’t get it, so I won’t be heading off to the UK this year. I first heard about the residency about a week before the application was due. In my haste …
Newsletter 031 – January 27th, 2023 Hi, In the last newsletter I mentioned that I had plans for several things I intend to accomplish this year. In this one I’m just going to list them chronologically (without much explanation), but over the next few newsletters I’ll detail how I plan to complete those things. So, …
Newsletter 030 – January 13th, 2023 Hi, Welcome back. I hope you had a good winter break, and are experiencing a new year full of new possibilities. The next few newsletters will look back on what I’ve been doing this past year, and how that relates to what I have ahead of me in 2023. …
Newsletter 028 – December 9th, 2022 Hi, In the title above you might recognize part of a quote from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. “I Open at the Close” was engraved on the Golden Snitch. This is about the opening sentences of stories. This quote from Joyce Carol Oates was recently posted in an …
Newsletter 027 – November 25th, 2022 Hi, About the image above: I’m already breaking my idea of using a simple newsletter header by showing you the image above. This is a picture of the original cover of my first published novel, The Jagged Man. At the end of this email I have a sample of …
Newsletter 021 – August 26th, 2022 Hi, About the image above: The prominent island to the right of the tree in the center is Bald Porcupine Island, off the coast of Bar Harbor, Maine. A little farther in the distance are some other islands with spiny names (Sheep Porcupine, Burnt Porcupine, and Long Porcupine Islands). …
Newsletter 020 – August 12th, 2022 Hi, About the image above: I attended a writing retreat in the summer of 2015, held by the Writers’ League of Texas (WLT) on Sul Ross University’s campus in Alpine, Texas. My home in Spring (a northern suburb of Houston), is almost 600 miles away from Alpine. About 200 …