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.”

We’ve already got quite a few attendees, and I’d really love it if you joined us. My portion of the panel will be for business-to-customer relationships, and I’ve got a lot to share with you. Also, I’d like to point out that there is a Q and A section at the end of the webinar.

Sign Up for the Free Small Business Twitter Webinar.

Thanks to Elliott over at Good Plum for recommending me to speak on this webinar geared toward small businesses.

Hope you can make it!

March 9, 2009
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On Writing a Serial Novel

Violet WarLast 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.

Another way I’m circumventing those information dumps is by adding chapter breaks which are memories and pieces of info that Sophie knows. Once the “House of Illusion” is broken, she begins to remember bits and pieces of her former life. The things she remembers may seem innocuous at first, but might have a larger impact on the overall story in the end. (*hint*)

Technology has also played a big part in my presentation of this novel. If you look at the physical structure of how Argentum is laid out, you’ll see that there are section breaks in the book. This structure is intentional because of the way this template handles numeric chapters. If I didn’t have a section, then Chapter 10 would have shown up after Chapter 1, which would have made things really confusing for my readers.

I’m pretty excited to have made so much progress on my project this past weekend. This is definitely new territory for me as an author, and I hope you get the chance to read my work.

March 2, 2009
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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 for literary writers, who find their advances shrink every time a publisher makes a “new” discovery. The argument of whether or not e-book readers will kill book sales continues to resurface, and the very nature of how corporations function take their toll on editors’ morale.

The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world.

There is no doubt in my mind that the publishing industry is fractured. Read More…

September 19, 2008
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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 is free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, on the modes of communication allowed, which does not restrict content, sites or platforms, and where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams. –SOURCE: Wikipedia entry for Network Neutrality

While there have been laws introduced to make network neutrality “official,” to date it’s just been a business concept. Highly contested, many big-names have come out in favor of net neutrality including Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. Recently, though, many telecom companies are testing the waters a little more fervently these days by putting caps on downloads. For example, Comcast will Cap Data Transfers at 250 GB October 1st and, as this YouTube! vlogger reported: TimeWarner is Experimenting with Capping Internet Usage in Texas. (About 2 minutes in.) Here’s a link to an article about Time Warner metering internet usage in Texas. Additionally, small ISP provider Frontier is toying with a 5 GB download cap.

What does this mean? It means that the concept of network neutrality is alive and well not only in Congress, but in our everyday lives affecting how we access the internet for email, gaming, blogging, banking, etc.

I hope that you will take time to read up on both sides of the issue, and whether you’re for or against it — realize that network neutrality is a topic that isn’t going away any time soon.

Save the Internet – a website that is for legalizing Network Neutrality

Hands Off the Internet – a website that is against legalizing Network Neutrality

September 17, 2008
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Oh Hai…Reading this Blog?

After dodging sunbeams and causing a rain of words to fall on my black umbrella…

I’m sorry to report that my blogging may be a bit sporadic over the next two weeks because I started getting some edits back on the first part of the novella I’m working on for Aletheia. While this is not a bad or a good thing, this is a function of the work. So Abstract Nova Press owns my soul, as one of the other writers so eloquently put it. I’ll have a proper write-up to promote the other two writers once we get done with this but for now—tappity-tap-tap until this is done.

In the promoting of other writer’s work arena, I had the pleasure of conducting an email interview with Tad Williams–one of the first fantasy authors I’ve ever read. He wrote The Dragonbone Chair Series, the Virtual Reality Science Fiction Series “Otherland,” and is currently working on a number of projects including the conclusion of his “Shadowmarch” fantasy novel series. Folks, this is one of the writers who is in that lucrative 3% I-write-novels-full-time-for-a-living bucket, a veteran within the industry who more than fulfills my requirement for writing big, fat, interesting books.

I’m also thinking about ways to be more specific about some of my blog posts, because I take a great deal of inspiration from the newbies out there who are putting the words on the page for the first time. It’s hard not to be heavily influenced by the lack of business-minded leadership from my college daze; while I truly enjoyed my college experiences I can’t really consider what I learned applicable in terms of writing as a business, which is an affliction many who “major” in writing share.

In other babbles, I’m resorting to cheezburger speak, guilty pleasure movies, soy mint chocolate chip ice cream sandwiches, the Justice League, and my idiot fuzzballs of kitty doom for intermittent entertainment. Going to see Iron Man this week–here’s hoping it does not suck. Hoping to see Indiana Jones when that comes out…I really hope that does not suck. Also going back to the gym whether it kills me or not; I can’t avoid working out and I’m excited the weather will be nice enough to do things outside but, like the rest of things these days, a bit spontaneous and unplanned.

Other than that, life is pretty status quo at the moment. Good news and change all around; it’s so easy to slip into the stream and be taken away by things you know will be positive.

Do you have any books or authors you’d like to recommend? Topics you’d like me to cover? Jokes you’d like to share? Feel free to post them in the comments and please, do not take it personally when I don’t respond to email during this busy time.

Protect your marbles and your doughnuts, folks. Things are no longer getting interesting–they’re already there.

April 29, 2008
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