Publetariat

Due to server updates to be applied the evening of 6/21/10, no new content is scheduled for posting to Publetariat until the evening of 6/22/10, 6pm Pacific Standard Time. The site will remain online and will be otherwise unaffected. Members can still post to their site blogs and to the Publetariat forum during this time.

We apologize for any inconvenience, and will see you right back here on the 22nd. (No need to click through – there’s no more to this announcement.) 

Listen to a PODCAST of this article.

This is a reprint from C. Patrick Shulze’s Author of Born to Be Brothers site.

This is a cross-posting from Lenox Parker’s Eat My Book.

Have you ever been stuck away from your computer with a deadline hanging over your head? What do you do? Grab your Smartphone, a piece of scrap paper or even a napkin and get to work.

As I sit here waiting for my flat tire to be fixed I started to worry about how I would ever get my post for this week finished in time. You see, I decided it would be best to refrain from using the computers at my job after one of them became infected with a virus. (I do a lot of research for these posts and with that comes the risk of viruses.) That means, with no computer access, I lose four hours of writing time everyday. My mornings and evenings are devoted to my little girl, so, again, no computer access. That leaves only a short time just before bed. It makes every lost moment (like now on my “writing day”) painful.

I’m a big believer in Murphy’s Law, but I also know that there are work-arounds to any obstacle — if you care to look for them. Writing on my little Palm Centro keyboard is not something I want to do on a regular basis, but, when faced with either doing that or losing even more writing time, I’ll take the hand crampage any day.

With a little luck, and a whole lot of creative thinking, any writer can find a way to keep working on The Road to Writing.

This is a cross-posting from Virginia Ripple‘s The Road to Writing.

Many moons ago I found myself in a bar called Green’s Grocery just outside of Nashville, attending a wedding reception for an old friend of mine. After wishing the newlyweds well I found an empty chair and struck up a conversation with a very nice man who turned out to be an accountant. When he asked what I did for a living I told him I was a storyteller. His eyes widened a bit as if I had confessed to alchemy.

From that moment it was little more than a hop, skip and jump to the question that every writer is asked sooner or later: where do you get your ideas? It was a question I’d been asked before, but until that day I had never fully realized that the human ability to invent stories or cobble them together out of life events is not universal.

As I talked with the man, and struggled to explain how ideas came to me, it became clear that he had never had the same thing happen to him. The more I tried to abstract the process, or explain it by using analogies, the more he insisted that the kind of narrative genesis I had been familiar with since childhood was simply foreign to him. The absurdity of the thought almost convinced me that he was pulling my leg, but it was obvious that he wasn’t. He simply did not think that way.  

I remember, too, a similar moment from my youth, when I learned that an acquaintance of mine was unable to think in three dimensions. My brother and I and a good friend of ours had grown up talking about machinery and mechanisms, describing them to each other in our heads, and from that anecdotal experience I had extrapolated that all human beings can hold a six-sided die in their mind’s eye and turn it to any perspective. But that isn’t true. There are a lot of people can’t do that.

For the purposes of this post I’m going to side-step the question of whether such mental abilities can be taught. I have an opinion in each case, but I will save them for another day. What I want to nibble at here is the relationship between events and stories, and how different events may suggest narrative threads that are either plot-driven or character-driven.

The Trooper
A few weeks ago I had occasion to take a long, unexpected road trip on Interstate 80, from the East Coast to the Midwest. Toward the end of the trip, as I crossed northern Illinois in the wee hours of the morning, I rounded a sweeping bend to find a patrol car swinging it’s side-mounted spotlight onto my rapidly-closing pickup truck.

I was confident I wasn’t speeding, but as I passed the patrol car pulled out and attached itself to my flank. I was too tired to care much, so I held my course and waited while the officer ran my plate. When he finally pulled me over it was more a relief than anything else.

Fully expecting to be informed that I had been traveling 66 in a 65, I was caught off guard when the officer informed me that I had twice drifted over the fog line. What’s the fog line, you ask? Well, I asked the officer the same question, and he informed me that it was the white line on the right side of the road marking the transition to the paved shoulder.

(What I did not say at the time was that whatever else I might have been doing, I was one hundred percent sure I had not drifted across the fog line twice. In dealing with authority it is always important to choose your battles, and debating what an officer of the law believes he saw is a guaranteed losing argument.)

Further confounding me, the trooper asked what year my truck was, to which I responded that it had been manufactured in 2001. After showing my license and registration I was surprised when the trooper asked me to get out of my vehicle and follow him back to his car. Fully expecting to have my breath checked, or to be put through a field sobriety test based on my wanton disregard for the fog line, I was again perplexed when the trooper directed me to take the passenger’s seat in his patrol car.

I spent the next fifteen minutes or so wedged between the passenger-side door and the trooper’s sprawling array of center-mounted computers and gadgets. During that time he asked me what seemed like a wide-ranging, repetitive and inane series of questions. The only nugget of information that interested me was that the trooper had pulled me over not simply because of my fog-line abuses, but because my license plate had come back as belonging to a white, 1998 truck. (My truck is silver, although a number of people have told me it looks white to them.)

When I later expressed puzzlement that my registration could be so wrong, the trooper said he would show it to me on his in-car computer. He then went back to peppering me with questions about where I was going and who I was going to stay with when I arrived, and forgot to show me the errant registration information. He did mention that registration information is often incorrect, however, which I found both oddly amusing and not at all reassuring.

Finally, as the trooper began to ask the same questions for the third time, a second trooper strode past my side of the patrol car. As he walked into the headlights I could see he had a dog with him, and moments later the dog started working the truck, sniffing here and there. When the trooper I was sitting with asked me if I had any drugs in my vehicle I just smiled and shook my head.

In short order the dog gave my truck the canine seal of approval, and a few minutes later I was on my way again with a simple warning about drifting over the fog line. Three hours later I reached my destination.

The Wreck
After a short stay in the Midwest I headed back to the East Coast on I-80 to attend a graduation ceremony. While traveling through Pennsylvania I crested a rise that had been cut through a mountain top and found the traffic in front of me at a standstill. Looking ahead I could see a minivan lying on its side on the left side of the road, and several other vehicles stopped nearby.

I pulled onto the left shoulder and sped past the stalled traffic, pulling up just short of the toppled minivan. Getting out I ran to the overturned van where several good Samaritans were already helping a woman out of the driver’s side door — which was now on top of the vehicle. Looking in through the sun roof and shattered front windshield I couldn’t see anyone else, but it was dark and the contents of the van had been tossed sufficiently that a child could have been lost in the debris.

As the woman was being helped to the ground I asked if anyone else was inside. She looked back at me wide-eyed, obviously traumatized by what had happened, but was lucid enough to say no.

I checked again to be sure just as someone nearby the gas tank was leaking. Two of the people who had stopped to help the woman led her down the road, away from the van. I fell in behind and tried to encourage the woman to stop turning her head from side to side, but her mind had clearly been overloaded by the crash and she was having trouble hearing me. (She should not have been moved, but it was too late for that.)

As the woman walked she was overcome with several violent spasms of adrenaline and fear. One moment she was quiet and walking slowly, then the next her body seized as if reliving the wreck. When we were a safe distance away I encouraged her to sit down by the side of the road, then I tried to get the others to help her keep her head and neck still. Looking at her eyes I could see that her pupils were round and equal, I couldn’t see blood anywhere, and she was clearly alert, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t about to drop dead from internal bleeding, or that she wasn’t headed for paralysis if her spinal cord had been bruised.

As I watched the woman for signs of shock I heard someone behind me talking about what had happened. The woman, talking to herself more than anyone else, suddenly said that she had been forced to swerve off the road to keep from running into someone. As she spoke I could see her again viscerally reliving the moment, then I heard someone say that the offending driver was turning around. Looking back up the road I could see a nondescript red sedan turning gingerly around in the middle of the highway.

Someone ran over to prevent the car from leaving, but I could see through the windshield that the driver was an old man who was oblivious to what had happened. Looking down the long hill I saw an off-ramp and realized that the old man had entered the highway in the wrong direction, driving up the hill toward the two lanes of traffic bearing down on him. I looked back at the van and I could see the tire marks where the woman had swerved violently to avoid a head-on collision.

Her hard turn to the left had sent her van into the solid wall of cut rock about fifteen feet off the side of the road. Fortunately, the cuts through the hilltop had been made at a slight angle away from the roadbed, so instead of slamming into the rock the woman’s van had been launched upward and over on its side. The ride must have been horrifying, but the glancing blow allowed the energy of the impact to be dissipated over a longer period of time. At highways speeds a head-on crash into the wall of rock would almost certainly have killed her.

In front of me the woman suddenly repeated what she had said: that she had to swerve out of the way to keep from running into the other car. I looked at her and told her she did the right thing. She didn’t have any choice. I told her that what had just happened to her was crazy — that it made no sense, and never would — and that she should not try to understand it. In the back of my mind I hoped someone would follow up with her in the days and weeks to come, to make sure she wasn’t suffering long term effects from the trauma.

I asked one of the people sitting with the woman to help hold her head still, then I told the woman that it was important not to move her head. Another reflexive moment of terror shot through her, but even as it did she said she felt fine. I explained to her that her body was flooded with chemicals that were making her feel that way, and after listening for a moment she calmed down and allowed the people sitting with her to hold her head still.

I walked over to the old man, who was now out of his car, and it was clear from his blank look that he had no idea where he was or what had happened. I’m not qualified to differentiate Alzheimer’s from senility, but I’ve seen Alzheimer’s before and the old man’s affect was familiar. Several people helped him to another car to wait for the police, and I was glad to see that no one was being unkind. It was clear to everyone what hand happened, and it was a miracle no one was dead.

Moments later a state trooper arrived, then another. I checked on the woman again and found her desperate to call her husband and her children’s school to let them know she would be late. Her cell phone was still in the van, but when I went to look for it I couldn’t find it. I did find her purse, and took it to her, but when I handed it to her I told her not to touch it or stick her hand inside. The outside of the purse was covered with shattered glass, and the inside contained dozens of large shards.

On the highway traffic began trying to sneak past the crash site. Up the road I heard two emergency vehicles coming, then saw the first of two emergency SUV’s bounding along on the narrow left-side shoulder, fighting to pass the traffic jam. At the same time cars and trucks began moving onto the left shoulder to pass one of the troopers, who had parked halfway into the right lane. The more the traffic moved over the more the approaching emergency vehicles had to drift toward the rock wall, until it became obvious that they were going to be stopped by drivers desperate to put the wreck behind them.

Feeling my own adrenaline I stepped out onto the road and stopped traffic until the emergency vehicles reached the scene. Across the highway I watched a perfectly-dressed trooper lead the woman who had been in the wreck to his squad car. Another trooper walked toward me and I pointed to the old man and filled the trooper in on what had happened. I looked at the woman sitting in the back of the patrol car, alone, and wondered if the air conditioning was on, and whether that could send her into shock.

I let the traffic on the highway go and tried not to judge the people who had sat and watched instead of gotten out of their cars to see if anyone needed help. Then I opened the door to my truck and pulled out a half-drunk bottle of water and tried to rinse the broken glass off my hands.

The Trooper Story
The trooper story is, to me, a plot-driven story. It’s about the moment when the trooper decides to see if my truck is ferrying drugs, and the way in which he goes about establishing probable cause for a search.

First he asserted that I was weaving over the fog line, but he never checked to see if I’d been drinking. If he really believed that I was having trouble staying in my lane, he would have checked to see if I was drunk. Second, he claimed that my registration information was incorrect, but he never showed me the incorrect info. My guess — and it’s only a guess — is that he simply made that up.

The Wreck Story
Despite the accident and the old man and all of the other narrative threads that suggest themselves, this story, for me, is not about the wreck. Rather, it’s a character-driven story that reveals itself through the broken glass I still had on my hands when I continued on my way.

I spent the next four hours and three hundred miles picking glass out of my fingers and palms while gingerly holding the steering wheel. I wondered if the woman would be all right. I wondered how many kids she had. I wondered what their lives would have been like if she had died. I wondered about the old man, and about the people in his family who knew he shouldn’t be driving, but who didn’t have the heart to take his freedom from him. I wondered how many lives had been changed on that day.

Where Stories Come From
Stories come from everywhere. They come from imagined events and real events. They come from choices. They come from awareness. They come from being alive.

If you have the requisite editorial sensibility — the ability to distill and organize events and imaginings into a narrative structure — then you will harvest stories everywhere because stories come from life itself. Whether you favor realism or fantasy, plots or characters, the events and truths underpinning your worlds and stories will all necessarily come from your experiences.

Your power as a storyteller is a combination of your native gifts, your mastery, your awareness and your ability to distill events. And whether your goal is art or entertainment, or both, your compass is the truth.

This is a cross-posting from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.

From the Lightning Source/PediaPress press release:

"With our innovative Create a Book platform, we required a technologically advanced company that understood the web-to-print model, and could satisfy our requirements. We needed a professional and reliable organization with high quality one-off book manufacturing and a globally distributed print network, and we found that with Ingram’s Lightning Source."

Heiko Hees, Managing Director of PediaPress

The recent start-up of Create a Book on the English language site of Wikipedia follows the successful launch of identical applications on the German, French, Spanish and 14 additional Wikipedia sites. Since the inaugural launch of the first Wikipedia book application in February 2009, Lightning Source has printed Create a Book wikis in 17 languages and has delivered books to 33 countries.

“The content-driven model from PediaPress and Wikipedia is part of the forward-thinking method of book supply we envision as the future of print-on-demand, and we are delighted to work with the PediaPress team on this innovative web-to-print model.”

David Prichard, President and CEO, Ingram Content Group Inc.

The Create a Book feature from Wikipedia enables a user to build a custom book from the articles chosen from their search on Wikipedia and other wiki sites that are supported by PediaPress’ book creator feature. Upon the completion of content collection, the user creates a book title, adds an editor name and selects a cover photo from a group of images and photos associated with the content selected. A 30-page preview is provided to the user for review. The user purchases the book online from the PediaPress web site, and book files are then uploaded to Lightning Source for manufacturing. Printed books are then shipped to their final destination from the closest of Lightning’s networked print facilities.
 

"[The aim of PediaPress is] to capitalize upon best-of-class technology to bring affordable books and textbooks to the corners of the world, where books and education in some geographic areas is still a luxury. PediaPress is based in Mainz, Germany, the small city in which Johannes Gutenberg changed the world forever by inventing modern printing with moveable type. Five hundred years later, our mission in Mainz is still the same – making printed knowledge available to all.”

Heiko Hees, Managing Director of PediaPress

This is a cross-posting from Mick Rooney‘s POD, Self-Publishing and Independent Publishing.

This review gave me wood!

convo.us/conversations/5088

"Wow. Reads like Raymond Chandler meets Hunter S. Thompson. Then there is the fundamental irony that the tough, gonzo writing is about…teaching English in a school in China… So of course I want to see what the experience is like. YOur style suggests it isn’t as tame as all that…"

-Douglas Gorney Convo.us

Hello, I am Sarie Mackay.  Coming out with my second self-published historical novel very soon.  First one:  Lodestar; new one:  Fair Game.  I’ve been invited by my alma mater to come back and speak on self-publishing.  I’m honored but I have to confess I have not read THAT MANY other self-published authors.  Can anyone out there tell me whom they believe to be some of the more talented self-published authors?   I certainly don’t want to go and blab only about myself.   I suspect whoever is reading this feels the same sense of cause celebre  that I do about working very hard on a creative task for a long time….and I would like to represent all of us. 

Check me out at sariemackay.com.  Thanks.

You’ve been asked to read a friend’s manuscript. After dutifully plowing through 100 pages of less-than-perfect, sometimes entertaining, but often difficult to understand prose you’re left with one question: how do you tell your friend her manuscript needs a lot of work?

Unless you really don’t care about hurting your friend’s feelings and possibly losing a friend, this can be a very tricky situation. I know several writers who refuse to read other people’s unpublished works for just that reason. Yet, it seems crueler to me to let a friend send an unpolished manuscript out knowing you could have helped.

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s The Road to Writing.

His description of the self-publishing movement boiled down to: “And if you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris and you’ve got yourself an e-book. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75″ He then goes on to describe the outmoded painful process of getting accepted in the traditional way, spoken like a true English major.  

This is a cross-posting from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.

Publetariat is taking the day off on Monday, May 31st in observance of Memorial Day. But never you fear, indie authors, small imprints and bookish types in all walks: we’ll be back with new content as per usual on Tuesday, June 1st.  (no need to click through, this is the end of this post)    – Editor

It is one of the hazards (and blessings) of being a writer that sometimes you find your imagination brimming with ideas. By brimming, of course, I mean overflowing the wee little cup you have. During the upturn of the typical "feast-or-famine"cycle, this could be great because you have a ready supply of concepts in hand to approach the markets. You surely must have something ideas that will be legitimate enough to catch the eye of some magazine or website. With so many ideas swimming around in those mental floodwaters, you may end up losing control. You may be wondering how you can manage your ideas constructively so a new project can be given the best chances of success.

How Does It Happen

1. Always write ideas down. You should never undervalue the importance of writing down your ideas so they can be references and [be] expanded. A stray idea without such recognition can join other unacknowledged thoughts and ideas. Both contribute to mental clutter – hardly a benefit to constructive management.

2. Organize them. Once you pour all of your thoughts and ideas onto paper or the computer screen, you should take some time to examine them and begin organizing them into categories. Once ideas have structure and potential contexts, they can be used more effectively. This also helps you separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. When you have a host of related ideas, it makes it easier to notice the ones that don’t belong.

3. Hatch a plan with your neatly arranged ideas. If you’ve taken the time to write them down and organize them, ideas offer you the chance to build a strong article, story, book, etc. You can save a lot of time, at least.  All of the relevant material is there in front of you, laid out in a reasonable fashion.

4. Pack them away. One of the most important steps to managing your ideas constructively is having the sense to put some of them away. When you’ve taken the time to write them down, organize them, even use some of them for projects, you’ll have material left over. You won’t always use it, but this doesn’t mean your ideas are great catalysts for future work. Save them. Refer to them at prearranged times or when something new but relevant comes up and you want to pursue it.

In Closing…

So what did you think? I know there are different opinions about this subject. In fact, there is much more that could be said. I wanted to skim the surface of the topic. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the issue of effective use of ideas. Leave a comment. Catch you later.

This is a cross-posting from Shaun C. Kilgore‘s site.

Authors have always been lucky enough to have a built in stress reliever whether they know it or not. It’s called writing a book. Once I’m working on my characters and their lives for a new book I’m so absorbed that nothing [and] no one in today’s stress-filled world bothers me.

I like getting lost in a developing story and putting the main idea whirling around in my head down. It’s a challenge adding to the skeleton story I’ve created to fill in and build a book. That takes all my concentration. I get excited every time I’m working on a scene, and when something new pops into my head for the character to say or do that fits into the story.

Humor is important to me. It should be to everyone. The more we laugh the better we feel. Humor is a stress reliever. Being able to laugh can make you feel more relaxed. You smile at someone, and they’ll smile at you. You laugh and someone laughs with you. The scenes in my book I’m working on that make me giggle while I’m writing them are the moments I’m told by readers that make them laugh out loud when they read my books. What a delightful feel-good moment for me to hear this from readers.

Sometimes, the comments are that my characters draw the readers into the story. In my mystery series of five books, the characters are so colorful that once the readers have finished the first book, they have to read the other four to see what happens next to everyone in the book. The same is happening now that I’ve written two books in my Amish series. Readers like the characters Nurse Hal and her Amish family. They want to know what will happen to all of them next. The readers are so deeply absorbed in the characters lives to the point that they try to read my books in just one sitting. While reading my books doesn’t leave any room for thinking about something stressful. It’s simply a time to relax. I know all this because I hear it from my book readers.

Not everyone has the inclination to write a book just to find a stress free time but if writing interests a person keeping a journal might be helpful. I’ve written daily journal logs over the years. Now it’s fun to look back and read about something that I had long ago forgotten. One journal was about the ten years I helped care for my father while he was battling Alzheimer’s disease. Talk about feeling stressed. In those days, I’d come home from my parents home and plop down exhausted emotionally and physically. I’d pick up my journal and write about that day with my father, entering my thoughts, emotions, fears and dreads. Though I hadn’t thought about writing a book at the time, that journal later became my book Hello Alzheimer’s Good Bye Dad. I’ve hoped that the story might be of some help to others. There are many similar books on the market about a family coping with Alzheimer’s. To make my book an educational tool rather than just a story, I added helpful tips throughout the book and in the story. Perhaps, reading that book would be a stress reliever for caregivers. They learn ways to help their family member while they become educated about what the disease will do to their loved one next.

I know for a fact that books help readers relieve stress. When I don’t like the programs on television in the evening, I tune out by reading a book while my husband watches a program. Then there is maybe the extreme when one buyer wrote me that she read one of my books (A Promise Is A Promise) six times while she’s been going through a tough spot in her life. Wow! I as an author am helping myself and helping others at the same time just by being creative. So if you’re a writer, relax and work on that story. If you’re a reader get you a good book (of course I’d like it if you bought one of mine at ebay, amazon or www.booksbyfaybookstore.weebly.com), set down in a quiet place with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and go with the flow.

This is a reprint from Fay Risner’s Booksbyfay blog.

Here’s the scenario: It’s late at night and after a long day of doing what you have to do (i.e. working, cooking, cleaning, etc.) you finally get a moment to do what you want to do: write. You sit down in your personal writing space, put your fingers on the keyboard (or wrap them around a pen) and wait for the words to come to you.

And wait.

And wait some more.

And then pass out face down on your desk for an uncomfortable (and unproductive) nap.

We’ve talked a lot about how hard it is to find time to write, but even when you do find the time, how do you also find the inspiration? 

My answer is music.

Not only can music stir up your brain waves, the right music can get you in the right mood for the exact subject matter you need to write about. Music can be a geographical reference (jazz, latin, hip-hop, western, etc.), an association with a particular time period (big band, disco, grunge, etc.) or specifically associated with certain emotions.

Read more

Today, I just wanted to look at a few good reasons why it is better to plan your next book rather than blindly taking a plunge and plunking down text on the page. In this case, I will offer five good reasons. At this time, I’m focusing this post on their relevance to writing a non-fiction book rather than the novel. I’m sure some of them would apply in some sense, but right now I find myself writing a piece of nonfiction so it is easier to write about nonfiction.

The issue we are addressing right now is really one of good project management. For most things, it really does make more sense to start planning out what you want to say before you ever write a single word. Think about? Most of those writing resources you’ve read or that are currently taking up space on  your bookshelf will mention something about the benefits of having a plan whether it is taking notes, writing a synopsis, or outlining. These are obviously important elements. Still, you may be one of those writers that ignores this little piece of advice and you tackle that book without a clear picture. I want to give you some really good reasons not to skip the plan.

Four Reasons

1. A plan helps you find a focus for the book. If you have started writing a non-fiction book with no thought for the contents, you may end up rambling along without a clear objective for the text. While you may have had a central reason for writing in the first place, this may be obscured by side issues. You could end up writing on tangents that change the real scope of your book to something you didn’t expect. You may even repeat yourself from different perspectives. Why muddle the content? If you have a focus that is organized as part of your overall writing plan then you can avoid these difficulties.

2. Keep your options limited. What does this mean? Well, you should be aware that there are many options to choose from when writing a non-fiction book. It is your goal to find a structure that will work for you and eliminate all of those that are not appropriate for the information or subject matter you’re trying to convey. This point might also include practical issues of design, page count, and distribution choices (especially if you’re a self-publisher). If you don’t narrow these considerations, the task of writing a book can become overwhelming.

3. Make sure you have a market. If you stop to take in all of the considerations about potential markets before you’ve starting writing, you can save yourself from producing a book that no one wants to read. This is particularly true in the realm of non-fiction where some topics have been so thoroughly covered that the market is saturated. Additionally, if you know you have a market before you write, then you will be able to produce a book that best fits the current needs of that market.

4. Consider the alternatives to your book. What do I mean by alternatives? When it comes to non-fiction there is room to think about peripheral benefits. If you do research and take the time, effort, even money to making this book happen, then you should consider how you can get the most out of this expense as you can. Simply put, planning up front allows you to identify markets for future books so you can start planning for the next project. You may be able to write on the subject in magazines or create a course which can help promote your expertise in your topic of choice. Think about how you can use the information and planning you’ve done to your advantage.


In Closing…

I’ll admit that these are just a few reasons. If you commit to planning before you write, you should be able find other reasons based on your own experiences or choices of topic. I wish you luck on your writing endeavors. If you have any other reasons, please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you. Keep writing!

This is a cross-posting from Shaun C. Kilgore‘s site.