Posts

The Journal Post

 As one can clearly see, I've not completely harnessed the ability to put aside distractions. I suspect a full year is long enough to go without posting on this blog and I'm sure I've upset my followers -- all forty or so of them. It's probably time I posted another story of lessons learned during my childhood and adolescence, but I'll save that for another day as well. What I want to post today is simply a sort of journal entry in an attempt to get back on track. Let's see, I'm still working on no less than seven different story ideas with seemingly no ability to finish one of them. The story ideas are still ranging from science fiction to fantasy.  Perusing through the statistics for my blog, I've realized that my most popular (most viewed) posts were about typewriters in my small collection. Are that many people interested in old typewriters or are typewriter enthusiasts just more dedicated than others? On another note, I recently attended a novel-wri

Building Character

This post is meant more for my fellow writers than the general public. Nonetheless, I believe that others may find something of value in these words. It is likely though, given my readership at this time, that I am posting this mostly for myself as a kind of record of my thoughts and discoveries. At any rate, today my thoughts lead me to the development of character, both in story and in life. I've been working on one particular story, off and on, for a number of years. I've written other stories, poems, and posts within this time but I keep coming back to this story to make small changes. Over the course of about eight years, I've made so many changes to this story idea that it has nearly come full circle back to its original concept. So, What has changed? The answer, my writerly friends, is character. When I first started building upon this story idea, I had a premise and a main character. My main character started with the name "Mehgan Mary McKendry," a goo

Is Amazon Unfair to Independent Authors?

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Is Amazon unfair to independent authors? Of course, I'm discussing here Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform or KDP. I hope you don't stop reading at this point but I believe the answer is a firm yes...  and no. The other day I was perusing through the Amazon bestseller list and noticed several kindle books at the top of the list that had a release date that was nearly a month away. In addition to this, each of the books had about 200 reviews. A later viewing showed books releasing at the beginning of next year with most reviews under ten. But still, they were all bestsellers already on the 2nd of November, 2018. "How is this possible," I thought. Of course, I know that an author with KDP can set a future release date but these early releases do not accumulate actual sales (although future sales have value in Amazon's algorithm) and can submit literary reviews through Author Central but Amazon does not allow a reader to post a review on somethi

Is Grammarly Worth it For Writers

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How many of you writers out there use the spelling and grammar checker in Word? Oh, come on. Don't be shy. I use it for the first pass on many of my writing projects, at the very least. It's great but I don't think it is the only thing that a writer should use to check their work. Grammarly promises to be extremely useful for writers, so I decided to give the free version a try and report my findings. Remember that my review is a personal accounting only and I am in no way advocating for or against the use of this product. I've found Grammarly to be extremely useful for posting on facebook, tweeting, or writing a blog post such as the one you are reading now. In fact, Grammarly shows my mistakes in real time and, if the mistake remains (through continued typing) provides me the opportunity to correct mistakes. Because of this feature alone, I can say that Grammarly fulfills all of its claims listed on television and youtube commercials. This feature alone has a

Tech Woes and Wonders

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Yes, I know that I normally post some nostalgic story on Saturdays. Not only am I a day late but I will post instead a short explanation for not posting yesterday. My old computer was getting, well, old and was affecting my writing. For my Birthday, my wife bought me a new computer. It uses the latest Windows operating system (yes my other computer lacked the computer power to operate with such a system) and I'm still learning, playing around, and generally getting to know the system. Still using Ywriter with great admiration. A bonus is that, with my new larger computer monitor, I can make the words bigger and easier to read. Thank you for your patience. I should be back to the regularly irregular schedule by Wednesday.