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One of the goals of any good writing is to pack a lot of information into as few words as possible. The biggest culprit in preventing this is the verb “to be.” The reason is simple: the verb is the lowest-common verb—it applies almost anywhere. But it is weak and flabby and applied too broadly. […]

Because I’ve started teaching online writing classes through Arizona State University’s Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, I’ve been having to put together exercises to help students understand and master a variety of techniques. One of the things I’m pretty much death on is using he said/she said or their variants in dialogue. I […]

The folks at Storybundle.com have put together two bundles where you get to set the price for what you buy. And these are smoking deals. First up in the Nanowrimo writing package. This is an incredible value. For the $20 I’d ask for my 21 Days to a Novel, you get ten writing books by […]

Casting news about the new Star Wars® film has created lots of controversy because of a lack of diversity among the cast. Many folks have been eloquent in expressing their disappointment and brilliant in their use of statistics to show why the cast should be more diverse. I agree with them, but for a different […]

I almost titled this post “A half-assed Time Travel experiment.” The short form of what I’m looking at doing during May is a way to avoid distractions. It’s much too easy for me to get distracted by movies and TV shows and even email. I find myself justifying it all as “research” or, well, really, […]

I’ve been seeing a lot written about how the rental of ebooks is the next big thing on the digital horizon. Most often the argument is framed as “looking for the Netflix of ebooks.” On the surface, when framed like that, the concept is brilliant. After all, look what Netflix did for Blockbuster. Borders is […]

As has been bruited about all over the ‘Net, Skyhorse heavily amended its letter of agreement to authors earlier this week. I’ve finally been sent a copy, got a chance to review it, and have decided I’ll sign. The agreement isn’t perfect. I still have my royalties cut, but not nearly as drastically as before. […]