on my latest cruising through the newstand writing magazines.
I’m actually thinking about subscribing to Writers’ Journal, as I have been finding useful articles in it each time I check it out. In this issue there were again several I marked, although I think I will paper clip this issue unlike the last one. This time [...] Read more »

I decided to revisit this topic for two reasons. One, on my last post on memoirs I received this comment.
To clarify about Laura Albert, she herself was an abused child and she never used AIDS to sell her books. Please try to find a reliable source for that misconception, it does not exist.What she did [...] Read more »

I got tagged with a “Seven Things” meme by Tara, which means I am supposed to tell you seven things about me that you don’t know. So I thought sure, why not
1. I love to paint and draw, but it takes a major back seat to my writing. (There is a post [...] Read more »

A nasty combo of the flu, returning to work for close to full time for the first time since the wreck, and a fairly major depressive episode managed to neatly take me 1-2-3 out of pretty much everything, including writing and blogging. But I am slowly crawling back to full speed, although it might take [...] Read more »

There’s been a lot of controversy over whether or not Wikipedia is a reliable research tool. The biggest problem that many of its critics have is the fact that pretty much anyone can edit it, so therefore they say it is unreliable, sometimes inaccurate, and sometimes unable to be substantiated. While this is true, I [...] Read more »

Or, in non-ten-year-old-speak, Duotrope has gotten a nice facelift. Their icons have gotten larger and clearer, and the colors of the genre icons are much clearer, making it much easier to tell which genre a market is looking for. (Before the colors of the genres could get confusing.) The payscale and length of works accepted [...] Read more »

Last month I wrote about the “Slow Magazine,” and my letter to inquire whether or not my submission was still up for consideration. As their current Duotrope’s stats are 9 responses vs. 16 assumed rejections/withdrawals, I wasn’t really expecting a reply, I was simply wanting to give them a chance to reply if they still [...] Read more »

I was looking up Tom Waits on Wikipedia and I came across this quote talking about how his voice sounds
“like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car.”

Ok, so it’s not what you would call perhaps, [...] Read more »

I started reading the web comic Shadowgirls back in August of 2007, shortly after the site went live. Written by David A. Rodriguez and drawn by Dave Reynolds, the about page says:
At the tender age of fifteen, Charon McKay disappeared from the small coastal town of Innsmouth. When she turns up, nine month later, she [...] Read more »

In the beginning of Moving on Nightfall, the protagonist, Jenny, is revealed to be a homeless, transgendered, late-teens prostitute. While I didn’t need to do a lot of research to develop her character or her living situation, I did do some research to make sure that I could give the readers a firm grasp on [...] Read more »

1.) Booty Babe Art - Big beautiful women statues - I own “Coco.” Mildly not work safe, because not all of the statues are fully clothed
2.) Rampant Plagiarism - It’s not what you expect! I love comic books and graphic novels - and photoshopping things. I’m such a nerd! Also Garfield Minus Garfield [...] Read more »

You should have seen this one coming … Who is your favorite Male lead character? And why?

Sad to say, I should have seen this coming, but I didn’t till last night. D’oh!
While my heroine came right to me, this week’s question wasn’t as easy. For some reason, Killashandra aside, there aren’t many characters that are [...] Read more »

Part three of three.
Part One
Part Two
Ok, so we’ve covered what a copyright is, and what it means to sell rights to publish a work. Now we’ll talk about bad ways to loose your first rights.
One bad way we’ve covered is to post your work online for free without having a clear plan on how [...] Read more »

Part two of three.
Part One.
Yesterday I talked about what a copyright is, how to obtain one, and what it means. Today I am going to talk about this concept of selling rights of publication for your work. When you submit a piece of writing to a market, you are offering them chance - or the [...] Read more »

(Part one of three)
Many beginning writers worry about whether they need to copyright their works for a variety of reasons. They worry that someone could plagiarize and claim ownership over their work, that editors or agents might steal their writing or their ideas, or that at some point they might need to prove that a [...] Read more »