Writing Tips & Links
Formatting a screenplay is A LOT of work. Theoretically, I suppose you could do it in a word processor, but it would take ten times as long and drive you crazy. That means screenwriters rely on software to do the heavy lifting so we can focus our energy on the important parts (you know, character…
by Grace Topping Today marks the launch of my mystery, Staging is Murder. It’s been a long road to publication, and I honestly don’t think I would have succeeded without Steve Alcorn’s course on mystery writing. It gave me a solid foundation on which to build. Without that foundation, I probably would have given up….
By Melinda Goodin Those who have read my work know that my stories tend to start with a bang — literally. If it’s not a space station exploding, it’s a church catching on fire or a laboratory or… And the pace gets faster from there. Critiquers have often commented that they ended up feeling breathless…
To begin, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dani Alcorn for inviting me to write a guest blog post for Writing Academy. My debut children’s picture book, Nobody Loves Mustard, unexpectedly became: An Amazon Best Selling New Release A Number 1 Best Seller (Top 100 Free) A Number 1 Best Seller (Top…
Today let’s talk about how to make sure subjects and verbs agree when a word like “or” comes into play. There can be more to this than meets the eye. This grammar game begins with a few terms to help you keep the rules in hand. The subject is the person, thing, or idea directing…
Myself. Yourself. Herself. Himself. Itself. Ourselves. Themselves. Yourselves. What are these words and how do we use them? They’re pronouns. (Quick refresher: Pronouns step in for nouns. They save us lots of boring repetition.) “Mrs. Smith baked a pie, and she shared it with her first grade class.” Without pronouns, look what happens to this…
If you do a search for “most common grammar errors,” the affect/effect duo is going to turn up. These two words are homophones. That means they sound alike. Well, they’re almost homophones; though not identical, they sound very much alike. We can see the difference in their spellings, but we don’t always hear it when…
Since my last post about Twitter I’ve learned A LOT! Hashtags Hashtags make the Twitter-world go round. A hashtag is something that “tags” a post. It’s preceded by the pound symbol (#) and cannot include any spaces. You can search for hashtags on Twitter and also use them to help people find you. I’ve added…
By Michele Martinez As a federal prosecutor in New York City, I spent most of a decade locking up hardened criminals. Specializing in narcotics and gangs cases, I knew crime inside out. By the time I left that job, I’d done so many drug trials, listened in on so many wiretaps, and debriefed so many…
You need an email list of potential customers to market your book(s) to. Surprised? You probably assumed email lists were just for businesses. But you are a business now! (PS That’s true even if you’re planning to go the traditional publishing route – agents and publishers will be very interested in you if you already…