Monica Valentinelli

narrative & visual storyteller

Tag: news

Blog

Breaking News: Using Facebook Pages? Log in ASAP

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up who is using Facebook “fan” pages. Yesterday, Facebook changed those pages to look more like profile pages, and added some new functionality. 3rd party ads are now more visible, you can provide a status update and they look more like a personal page. (Additionally, there is no ability to update your status message automatically by adding an “app” to connect with Twitter, either.)

However, if you have an existing account this new functionality is a hindrance rather than a benefit. The profile information that you had filled out to go underneath your logo is shifted to a new tab, and most of your customization has shifted.

If you’re using a Facebook page, I recommend logging in to see if this works for you. Otherwise, you can join me today while I dig around and see how I can make mine look better.

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Announcements

Need Help with Twitter? Free Webinar!

Hi everyone, just wanted to briefly pop in and mention that I’d like to invite you to sign up for a free webinar that’s going to occur this Wednesday. The webinar, led by Eric Glazer from Marketing Studio with three other professionals, is about “Leveraging Twitter to Grow Your Small Business.”

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Novels

On Writing a Serial Novel

Last Spring, I had announced that I was working on a free urban fantasy website called Violet War. The goal of the website was to promote a series of books I’ve been working on and offer the first draft of the series’ first book (Argentum) for free.

Since starting this project, I’ve found that writing a serial novel comes with its own set of challenges related to the fact that this is a novel of discovery.

In this book, the main character (Sophie Miller) is an exile (think convict) from her magical world. Sophie committed a terrible crime and was later experimented on by the Alchemists then imprisoned by them in a House of Illusion. Those experiments ripped apart her memories, so much so that when the illusion “breaks” she is forced her to deal with the world around her in unusual ways. At first, she doesn’t trust herself but later questions everything she sees.

These questions have turned into information dumps at times, so much so that some chapters rely on discussion rather than action to drive the plot. Fortunately, I’ve been able to catch those moments by sketching out the entire novel from beginning to end. Pacing is really important to me, because as a reader I get very bored when the story doesn’t move, so my chapters are relatively short. They range from one thousand to twenty-five hundred words for that reason.

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Blog

How the Publishing Industry is Evolving

This article entitled “Have We Reached the End of Book Publishing? spells out what I’ve suspected for so long and heard from some of my fellow writers — that the very nature of the way major publishers do business does not bode well for aspiring writers. Large, million-dollar advances taken on new authors spell doom […]

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Blog

Update on Network Neutrality – ISPs Rolling Out Caps for Internet Usage

One of the issues that I’ve been following fairly closely, is the concept of network neutrality. What is it? Wikipedia defines it as: Network neutrality (equivalently net neutrality, Internet neutrality or simply NN) is a principle that is applied to residential broadband networks, and potentially to all networks. A neutral broadband network is one that […]

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