Thought I would share what I instruct my undergraduate history students to do in their writing. I think that particulars and specificities help historians make arguments and tell stories. Here they go! Use the past tense to describe historical events. Ensure your statement is specific. Never use such phrases as:
This is one of the hardest questions to answer since it's never done. A book can keep going and going... and going. For years. In fact, full disclosure, I just submitted my "Revised" manuscript to an academic publisher. The project started in 2007, dissertation defended in 2012, pages first submitted
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfpublish/wiki/index I always refer to this list just to check if a company is on the author beware list. The resources here for writers are outstanding. Emerald Books Gray Fox Walks: an artistic children's book celebrating the natural world The Brass Starling: mystery and magic in 1910 Manhattan
For some reason, our new years are always filled with autobiographies. I think we've done four of them in December and January alone! We love making these family volumes to bring people closer and help them share the stories of their lives. These books become family treasures, and it is
Focus is my January word. My daughter taught me about the "flow state." When I think about the work of writing and editing, I think about two kinds of focus: There is the necessity to just focus on one thing, the task at hand. For that, I use one of
I keep saying I'm shocked but not surprised about today's attempted coup d'état. What a time to be a historian. I see resonances of this event in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and the attempted fascist coup in France on February 6, 1936. I know that democracy will prevail.
The Demon's Gift is a free novella set in the Willow Locke world. It's been really cool to expand the world of the novel and write in a different style. It's a gritty, noir story featuring a hard-boiled cop struggling to hold onto his sense of morality. I like writing
At the start of COVID lockdown, I decided to deviate from my normal choice of Sci-fi and Fantasy novels and look into Obama's reading list to find my next book. The one that stood out to me was Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee
Marketing is such an odd term. If you had told me in High School that my career path would lead to marketing, I would have been so confused and angry with myself. I always considered marketing to mean some conniving, yet still boring, business company that needed to know
Plottr is a simple program for planning a novel. If you join your local writing group, you will probably here authors talk about "pantsers" vs "plotters." These terms mean that some people prefer to sit down and write by the seat of their pants and let the novel take them
