Just this weekend I posted a blog with a misspelled word in the heading–“dos” instead of “does”. Well, my Spanish isn’t good enough to pawn it off as the number two, which didn’t make sense anyway, so there I was with the only line showing on the link broadcasting my error. A delightful friend immediately sent me a comment on Facebook, “Is this an editor’s test? lol” Why didn’t I just go with it and say, “Yes!”? I caught it and fixed it right after I hit “Publish” on WordPress, but since I have automatic share for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, it was out there for all to see. In my haste to remedy this, I sent the whole post to trash. It was a rather lengthy poem with visually descriptive words, now lost and gone forever, except for the heading postings everywhere which now link to nothing.

A Magic…

When I posted my interview with Sarah Solmonson earlier this morning, it reminded me that a couple of people have asked me to put up a post on the finer points of doing an author interview. I’m not sure I would call me an expert on this topic, but I try to answer those who ask me a question, so this post is for them.

I will share my opinion here, not saying that anyone should take my words as gold, but here is what I think:

A successful author interview begins with an interesting author. I am not pointing fingers and calling anyone boring, but if you want your interview to shine, choose authors that have something to bring to the party. I like it very much when the authors I interview have a very personal interest in their story. This doesn’t mean it can’t be fiction, just…

Each of your tweets only reaches a fraction of your followers. One way to reach a wider audience on twitter is the re-tweeting culture. People re-tweet tweets whose contents are related to their own, a favour that often is returned by the other party. I’ve been amazed at the kindness and curtesy you can find on twitter.

Many authors have started doing this in more organised (and less time consuming) ways by uniting with other authors on Facebook in tweet groups where they share each other’s tweets in daily reciprocal threads.

In reality it works something like this:

Someone creates a post in a particular FB tweet group. That post becomes the thread for that day and is open for 24 hours. Each author leaves a comment with a link to a tweet
e.g. https://twitter.com/CFFBooks/status/620927821502877696
Each participatant will retweet all the tweets in those comments on that day in exchange for their tweet being tweeted by everyone else.

One of the challenges of being a parent or a grandparent in 2015 is keeping children from becoming couch vegetables. With all of the electronic gadgets available now, this task has become even more difficult. I watch children all the time whose only interest is playing on electronic toys. Having said that, I don’t want to give the impression that electronics are all bad. Technology may be the future for some of our children and their occupations. What I worry about, however, is that children will lose all passion for anything else in the world. Technology has a tendency to pull children in so that they don’t engage with the rest of the world. This is one of my fears and a challenge I see when parents try to get their children interested in something else. The key is to begin early.

Early childhood developmental stages in children are the…

I downloaded the trial version of Scrivener a couple of years ago, but at that point it all went completely over my head. So many people seem to love it so much that I downloaded it again recently, and after completing the tutorial realised that it isn’t all that complicated and quite a brilliant tool. I don’t think I’m going to keep it though, because it seems limited when it comes to inserting images for eBooks, and I quite like using Microsoft Word. When the new 2010 version arrives at the end of this month there will be a whole lot of useful new functions for us scribblers to use too, including having multiple browsers viewable on your desktop simultaneously. My favourite things on Scrivener are the corkboard and the ability to open two different documents at the same time. I already can, and do, open and work on two…