Tuesday, August 31, 2021

WANTED: Beta-Readers

I am looking for a few Beta-Readers for my next novel: 

     THE LAW OF LUMINA

What a Beta-Reader does is read my novel before it gets published and make recommendations for improvements. 

You'd get to read the book early and maybe even get thanked in the Acknowledgements!

If this sounds like fun email me at: martin.wilsey@gmail.com

--Let me know if you are interested!

Monday, August 30, 2021

Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Quotes of the Week

If you want to fly, you have to give up the shit that weighs you down.
—Toni Morrison

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius, and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.
—Marilyn Monroe

I am not responsible for the ideas and opinions that my characters express.
—William Faulkner

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
—Stephen King

Write drunk; edit sober.
—Ernest Hemingway

Monday, August 23, 2021

It was an Excellent event!

 I had a great day at McKay Books in Manassas VA! Thanks to everyone that came out!


--Now I just gotta finish this next book by FRIDAY!

Saturday, August 21, 2021

Signing Books today at McKays!

For the first time in a long time, I will be signing books, TODAY, and meeting new friends. Come out and see me!!

 

--Make it happen. You might win free stuff!

The Hourlings Podcast Project, E44, Fan Fiction

Friday, August 20, 2021

The Fast Friday Interviews: Vince Scarsella

Tell me about yourself, Vince?


I am a retired lawyer hiding in Venice, Florida, who now writes about bad lawyers among other things.  I have a series of 4 novels under the "Lawyers Gone Bad Series" based upon my experiences as head of a lawyer discipline office up in Buffalo for over 18 years.  I also write other crime and speculative fiction novels. 

Tell me about your current Book:


When Pardon Me occurs, Dean Alessi, the hero of the LAWYERS GONE BAD SERIES, takes on each of his antagonists in the propr 3 Lawyers Gone Bad books, plus some new one and tries, once again, to avoid becoming a permanently retired lawyer. 

What are you working on now?  


I am working on an alien invastion novel called, "Inhumane," in which the invading aliens aren't highly evolved lizard or insect creatures but strikingly siimilar to human beings!


Tell us something that people don't generally know about you:  


I don't like Mickey Mouse, and that is the inspiration for my play, "Land of the Greedy Mouse."

What is a favorite lesson you have learned about the business of writing?  


You have to spend money to make money - just be careful and don't spend too much! 

What is the best piece of writing advice you give to new authors?  


Read, read, read, write, write, write, research, research, research, revise, revise, revise, market, market, market, then, write....

Links: 

Twitter:  Got suspended because I'm conservative. 



Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Quotes of the Week

If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.
—Katherine Hepburn

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart you feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
—Kurt Vonnegut

Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your #writing until it has been done to you.
—Stephen King

Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. Just do it and the confidence will follow.
—Carrie Fisher

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone’s. 
—Dorianne Laux

It has never been easy for me to understand why people work so hard to create something beautiful, but then refuse to share it with anyone, for fear of criticism.
—Elizabeth Gilbert

Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.
—John Cleese 

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

Chris Bohjalian’s 10 Tips To Help Aspiring Writers Stretch Their Fiction

  1. Don’t merely write what you know. Write what you don’t know. It might be more difficult at first, but – unless you’ve just scaled Mount Everest or found a cure for all cancers – it will also be more interesting.
  2. Do some research. Read the letters John Winthrop wrote to his wife, or the letters a Civil War private sent home to his family from Antietam, or the stories the metalworkers told of their experiences on the girders high in the air when they were building the Empire State Building. Good fiction is rich with minutiae – what people wore, how they cooked, how they filled the mattresses on which they slept – and often the details you discover will help you dramatically with your narrative.
  3. Interview someone who knows something about your topic. Fiction may be a solitary business when you’re actually writing, but prior to sitting down with your computer (or pencil or pen), it often demands getting out into the real world and learning how (for instance) an ob-gyn spends her day, or what a lawyer does when he isn’t in the courtroom, or exactly what it feels like to a farmer to milk a cow when he’s been doing it for 35 years. Ask questions. . .and listen.
  4. Interview someone else. Anyone else. Ask questions that are absolutely none of your business about their childhood, their marriage, their sex life. They don’t have to be interesting (though it helps). They don’t even have to be honest.
  5. Read some fiction you wouldn’t normally read: A translation of a Czech novel, a mystery, a book you heard someone in authority dismiss as ‘genre fiction’.
  6. Write for a day without quote marks. It will encourage you to see the conversation differently, and help you to hear in your head more precisely what people are saying and thereby create dialogue that sounds more realistic. You may even decide you don’t need quote marks [ a.k.a. inverted commas] in the finished story.
  7. Skim the thesaurus, flip through the dictionary. Find new words and words you use rarely – lurch, churn, disconsolate, effulgent, intimations, sepulchral, percolate, pallid, reproach – and use them in sentences.
  8. Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine…and then make them plausible.
  9. Write one terrific sentence. Don’t worry about anything else – not where the story is going, not where it should end. Don’t pressure yourself to write 500 or 1,000 words this morning. Just write 10 or 15 ones that are very, very sound.
  10. Pretend you’re a banker, but you write in the night to prove to some writing professor that she was wrong, wrong, wrong. Allow yourself a small dram of righteous anger.
--Check out the full article on Writers Write.

Monday, August 16, 2021

Meet the Author Event

For the first time in a long time, I will be signing books, and meeting new friends. Come out and see me on Saturday!!
 

--Make it happen. You might win free stuff!


Friday, August 13, 2021

Fast Friday Interviews: Teagan Kearney

Tell me about yourself?

Thanks, Martin for the invite. One thing you need to know about me is that I’m passionate about stories. To be honest, I’m obsessed with writing. I love the process of creating characters putting them into difficult situations and figuring out how to extract them from those terrible situations. I think about my characters, how they look, how they sound, how they act. 

And sometimes, ideas pop into my head at the oddest of times. I was walking down the street when I noticed a sign for an agency of some kind (I never found out what kind) with the name Adept Solutions. From seeing that sign, the idea for a private detective agency run by a team of quirky supernatural characters popped into my head. The result: an urban fantasy trilogy, Adept Solutions Series of Special Investigations for the Magickally Challenged.

Another time, I was sitting on a bus and the idea for a main character popped into my head. As it happened, the opening scene in the book takes place on a bus, but the character who came into my mind, Vanse, the vamp, did not become the protagonist, but still played an important part in the urban fantasy Kala Trilogy. 

I write most days, at least a little something, to keep the wheels turning. When I wake in the morning, I do a little yoga, a little meditation, drink my coffee, and sit down to write. The last thing I think about as I go to bed at night is what’s coming next in the story. The amount I write per day varies, but somewhere between a thousand and, 1300 makes me feel I’m making progress and gives me time to have a life outside writing.

I have a queue of stories lined up in my head, some of which have made it onto the page and are now stashed away either in a file or a box, and they may never see the light of day again. There are others which I think about, and may even have started, before the current work-in-progress pushed them out of the way. Most of my novels fall under the sci-fi/fantasy umbrella, but I detour into different genres from time to time. So far, I have ventured into romcom and women’s fiction territory, and also published a collection of short stories, Untender Lives. There you have it, that’s me. If you want to know more about me you can read my autobiography on my website, and find out about my ebooks, audiobooks and my three free first-in-series books. >

Tell me about your current Book:

My current project is the finalization of the audiobook of Demon’s Nemesis, Book 3 in the Kala Trilogy for Audible. The Kala Trilogy centers around an eternal triangle between a healer, a demon, and a vampire. Angelus wants control of Tatya’s power, but is frustrated, lifetime after lifetime, by Vanse, a master vampire in love with Tatya. However, in the current incarnation, events come to a climax. 

When Angelus, kidnaps Tatya, her allies, Vanse and Forked Lightning must find and free her, so she can lead the battle to destroy the demon.

Tatya has sent the demon who pursued her back to Hell. Now she’s about to open a healing center and use her gifts to help those in need. The only one she can’t help is the man she is in love with, the vampire master, Vanse, who lies in a coma.

When an ambitious vampire arrives in town with designs on Vanse’s family, Tatya’s plans are turned upside down. Her best friend, the local shaman, Forked Lightning, puts his life on the line to help, but chaos and tragedy follow when Tatya is kidnapped.

Far from home, imprisoned, and alone, Tatya must escape and find her way back to those she loves.>

What are you working on now?

Currently, I am working on a psychological thriller (I call it a tragedy), most of which I wrote while completing the  ‘Finish Your Novel’ online course run by the publishing house of Faber and Faber at their Faber Academy. This is a new genre for me and the course has been brilliant as I wasn’t sure I had the courage to put this story down on the page. The course has been an investment in my writing, and the story I have now isn’t the one I started with. It has changed and grown over the course and definitely benefitted.

Tell us something that people don't generally know about you:

As an intensely private, somewhat introverted person this isn’t an easy question, but here’s one fact (well, three) that most people don’t know about me. The curriculum we studied at school was a little different from today, with some subjects divided into divisions according to ability. The result: I was in the first division for Latin, the second division for French, and the third division for math. I think that says it all, don’t you?

What is a favorite lesson you have learned about the business of writing?

Don’t ever give up. Persevere. You may one of those rare souls who produces a brilliant book with their first effort, but don’t bank on it. Writing, like most things, improves with practice. It’s a muscle, so strengthen it, develop a daily habit of putting something down each day, and before you know it, you will have your story.>

What is the best piece of writing advice you give to new authors?

Once you’ve written, edited, taken some time out, and rewritten your story, get feedback. Constructive criticism from trusted, thoughtful readers/reviewers is invaluable as you can learn what your strengths are as well as where the book could be improved. >

Links:

Email: teagankearney@gmail.com 

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/author/teagankearney 

Blog: https://writingmynovelnoworkingtitleyet.blogspot.com 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TeaganKearney/   

Twitter: https://twitter.com/@teagankearney 

Pinterest: https://uk.pinterest.com/teagankearney/

Thanks, again, Martin. This has been great fun!


Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Quotes of the Week

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
—Stephen King

Words are, of course, the most powerful drugs used by mankind.
—Rudyard Kipling

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.
—William Faulkner

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
—Robert Frost

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
—Orson Welles

When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'
—Quentin Tarantino

Nothing that happens to a writer, however happy, however tragic, is ever wasted.
—P.D. James

Wednesday, August 4, 2021

Quotes of the Week

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
—Pablo Picasso

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.
—Philip José Farmer

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.
—Caroline Gordon

When you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re...in the right place to do something exciting.
—David Bowie

I am not responsible for the ideas and opinions that my characters express.
—William Faulkner

Revenge is a dish best served published!
—Lisa Kovanda

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings.
—Stephen King

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
—W. Somerset Maugham

Don’t worry about what your mother thinks of your language.
—Elmore Leonard