I’ve recently joined a writing site: The Next Big Writer. It’s devoted to writers submitting work-in-progress and exchanging reviews with an eye toward improvement. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for since I completed June Betrayals and I joined with high hopes. I haven’t had other writers critiquing my work in a long time and [...]

What’s wrong with this scene?

Sheryl tossed her rich, luxurious mane of raven-black hair over her shoulder, the late-afternoon sunlight filling it with highlights. “Kiss me,” she said.

Rico took a long, leisurely sip of his Sumatran double-expresso, the half-and-half and two packets of raw cane sugar helping it slide down his throat like liquid gold. He [...]

First you create your protagonist, then you create an antagonist to prevent them from getting what they want. That’s one of the basic tools of character-oriented writing lessons. This makes it easy to write lessons, but hard to write really good fiction, because your protagonist’s most constant enemy is him/herself.

This is particularly true of continuing [...]

Everybody seems to be talking about marketing these days. As a programmer, we always took Dilbert’s “Welcome to Marketing: Two Drink Minimum” attitude about marketers as a breed, but I’ve run across at least two gurus of the art that make it seem not only credible as vocation, but interesting, entertaining and potentially profitable. Seth [...]