Being An Indie Novelist is Tough, But Rewarding

It’s time to rant. I haven’t had serious time to work on the second book in my science-fiction series because I have been swamped with the day job, and swamped with my side jobs. I’m a high school English teacher by trade, and at the start of the year I had things under control.  However,

3 Step Method to Finding and Fixing Plot Holes

My latest novel, The Terminarch Plot, is probably my most ambitious work yet.  I spent at least 6 months designing the backstory and various otherworldly settings where the series would take place. However, once the first novel was complete and off to the beta-readers, I was informed right away that there were several plot holes that

Your Rough Draft is Finished…Now What?

You’ve written a 50K plus novel.  It’s been a difficult road.  Perhaps you spent six months or six years, but it is finally done and you feel that sense of accomplishment that comes with completing such a monumental task. Now what? The following is my personal regimen that moves a rough draft to a finely

New Podcast Up: Crucial Chapters and Black Widow

In this episode we discuss the topic of the crucial chapter or the chapter of your novel that is the key to the entire story. For indie writers who often do their own editing (and they shouldn’t) this chapter is the make-or-break-it chapter of the novel so it should be as free of errors as possible. How

The Biggest Mistake Made When Writing a Crucial Chapter

Currently I am reading Spell or High Water, book 2 in Scott Meyer’s “Magic 2.0” series.  The novel series is a best seller, and not only that is a fantastic trilogy of novels that I highly recommend.  However, I reached a point in the novel that was a crucial chapter, a chapter where a lot of

3 Web Tools for Free Promotion and Beta-Reading

As an indie author, I am always on the lookout for ways to promote my books and make them better.  This week I found a few tools on the web that could potentially help me with this process.  As always, I thought I’d share: Wattpad – I had heard about this site a long time

5 Ways to Improve Your Writing Style

Why is it that two different writers could write in the same genre, write about the same ideas, plot devices and themes yet one writer creates beautiful prose while the other makes the reader never want to read again? Every time I write a chunk of prose that really sings through the initial first draft,

10 Things to Consider Before Writing a Novel

Currently life is preventing me from reaching my daily quota on my new writing project.  I suppose if I hadn’t considered a few rules to set for myself before I began this project, I would be spinning my wheels in the endless morass of counter-productivity. I set some basic ground rules before I began writing,

A Whopping 5 Copies!

I looked at my sales report for the month of April, and discovered that I had actually sold 5 print editions of my two new novels combined. One could become very depressed about that, spiraling down into a pit of deep despair until Prince Humperdink sets the “machine” to 50 out of rage. Yet I

Dialogue and Description: The Delicate Balance

One of the biggest problems I encounter when giving advice to other writers is the problem of how much dialogue is too much without ample description to back up the verbiage. The truth is that many amateur writers either lay on the description until they become like Charles Dickens or they write page after page