During a conversation with a fellow author yesterday, the subject of tinkering came up. Both of us, it became clear, will read and re-read our draft chapters and stories and, as is normal, we will spot something. It can be prose, sentence construction, plot discrepancies…almost anything. In my own case, knowing that people were reading story samples resulted in me going back and re-reading the samples, only to find…yep, you guessed it, stuff that I […]
We recently returned from a week’s vacation in St. Maarten. St. Maarten is still recovering from Hurricane Irma in September 2017, exactly 4 years ago. A significant percentage of buildings are still not repaired or re-opened after that event. When we went there in 2014 we stayed at the Orient Bay nudist resort. The resort was mostly destroyed, and has yet to be rebuilt. Kind of sad to see derelict shells and roofless buildings where
Vacation – Ideation and Percolation Read More »
This morning, I found myself staring at a question that I commonly see on social media: This, in broader terms, leads to the classic worry that I think most authors have: what if somebody else plagiarizes or steals all or part of my writing and claims it as their own? (This, by the way, applies to almost any type of writing; fiction, non-fiction, current affairs, you name it). I have done a lot of reading
Revealing WIP, plagiarism and theft Read More »
I have taken to describing Books of Loukas as “33% mermaids, 33% fantasy and 33% smut” over the last few months when asked to provide a summary of the position of the books in the weird classification zone that we call “genre”. I settled on that description after a while, since it seems to encapsulate the main positioning elements of the books in the whole sphere of fiction. I concluded a long time ago that the
How to describe the Books of Loukas? The Quandary Read More »
When I completed the first draft of Book 1 of this series in the Spring of 2018, I immediately sent it in ebook form to a couple of dozen friends. That was a mistake. It was a mistake for 2 reasons: 1. Friends are not the correct people to ask to be reviewers. They often are unwilling to tell you what you need to hear (one lady friend flat-out refused to review it, her comment
Books of Loukas – appeal for beta readers Read More »