Musings of Two Creative Minds

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...

For those of you who haven't heard yet, my father-in-law has been fighting cancer for the last year.  Unfortunately, he's fought the good fight but due to masses of blood clots in his head, they cannot finish the job.  So he is now in hospice care at home.  As you can imagine my wife, myself, and our family are devastated and are trying to spend as much time with him as we can.    So I won't be posting as much, but I don't want my readers to be left without much new here. So I'm offering you all the chance to post articles about writing here on my blog.  Feel free to push a book or books of yours, but please offer some tidbits or story about an aspect of writing and how it affected that particular book(s).   I'm looking for insights into plot, editing, characters, development, rewrites, cover art, publishing, agents, self-publishing, etc.  Again, all I ask is that if your pushing  book, make sure the article connects to it.   I ...

For those who didn't already know, I have a Vlog over on YouTube.  Now I know I've gained more readers over time, especially since I last posted any videos here.  And those I believe were from Christmas here in Marina California. Normally my videos are all about writing and its many aspects:  settings, plot, character development, getting ideas, finding inspiration, dealing with writer's block, publishing on Createspace and Smashwords, etc. Here is the latest video I posted a few weeks ago.  You may want to check it out or go to my YouTube channel to check out some of the other videos I've made.  I tried making this last one a bit more amusing, but without going overboard and ruining the main point I was trying to make in the video of how to make a mistake into a plus. Enjoy.