Musings of Two Creative Minds

Hi again everyone.  Yes I know it's been a few weeks since the last entry but I've been busy.  Started hearing back from my Beta-Readers and began making corrections to the manuscript.  Long process some days, but very necessary.  There were issues that got past me and my main editor, which is why I wanted more pairs of eyes looking the book over. This was something I did not do enough of on my first book "The Bridge".  Luckily, people were so enamored by the story that it still earned a lot of 5 star ratings.  However, it could have gotten more if I'd taken the time like I have been with "The Ship".   Anyway, I ran across a new issue as I finished making the adjustments to the manuscript.  These came in the form of 'formatting' issues.  When you submit your MS Word document to Createspace, Kindle, or Smashwords they all have slightly different formats they want you to follow.  Luckily, you can do Kindle through Createspace when...

This week I got 8 people lined up as "Beta-Readers" for my second novel "THE SHIP". For those not familiar with beta-readers, they are basically test readers for you book.  They will read the story and give you feedback on what they thought of it.  But what kind of feedback am I talking about? Well this may vary from writer to writer.  For me I'm looking for the following feedback: 1-Did they like the story? (this is a given, I have to know whether or not the story is even working for my readers in the first place) 2-How was the pacing?  Did the story drag a lot, or was it too-fast paced and hard to keep up with? 3-Were the characters likable and did you come to care about them?  Did they intrigue you?  Did you want to see more of them in the future?  (I'm working on an ongoing series where I will rotate some of the cast from time to time) 4-Spelling errors?  (I've done my best but some things will still slip past me so a few mo...

As most of you know by now, I've started work on my third novel.  What makes this book different though is the fact that I'm writing in the first person instead of the third person.  In the third person one tends to do a lot of "he said," "She smiled", etc.  Whereas the first person is a bit more personal in my opinion.   Just about all writers like to let the audience inside their characters heads.  Some will do it in the "omniscient" style, where they let  reader see inside every characters head in the same scene all at once.  We're allowed to know what they're thinking, even if they don't share their thoughts with the other characters.  Or  the author will let you inside one character's head at a time.  This is called 'limited perspective' which is what I use a lot, where I only let you inside one character's mind at a time, even within the same scene.  But I'll indicate the 'change' of who's head...

Before I get into promoting my new blog, I thought I should explain myself to you all.  The reason why I've created "The Vampire Blogs" was simple.  It's part experiment, and part story building.  With the popularity of vampires in books, it was only a matter of time before I found myself getting drawn in, although I had sworn to avoid the genre.  Yet, like any writer, I couldn't help speculating on  "Well, if I did a vampire story, I'd make it more original and do this, this and this..."  Naturally, an idea came and began to snowball on me. I wanted to keep most if not all the typical strengths and weaknesses of the traditional vampire, while at the same time making such a being fit into my Para-Earth Series world.  The being I would have a reasonable explanation for the various abilities such as shape-shifting, turning into mist, etc.   I would also give him a few new traits that fit with the being I had made him out of.  I won't go in...

Yesterday, against my better judgement, I started writing a second book.  Now I'm still working on "The Ship" which is the sequel to my first novel "The Bridge".  But I was having troubles with "The Ship".  I was making progress, but it was so slow I was going crazy at times.  I would write over a 1000 words in one day and then dump about half of them because they weren't moving the plot along or really helping develop the characters as much.  I kept what did seem to be working and built on that the next day.  Sometimes this is one way of dealing with Writer's Block for me. Then yesterday, something else happened.  An idea for a different book that is part of my Para-Earth series started gelling like no one's business.  It had sat on the back-burner for so long now it was boiling over.  Scenes and characters started coming to life to such an extent I had only one of three options: A) Start writing the book B) Leave it alone and hope I ...