Editing your work the right way
From Rick: There is no such thing as the perfect editor or the perfect way to edit your work. I freely admit that I do slip up despite my best efforts and intentions. Even good editors can slip up. This
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Analyzing your story, Part-4: Keeping your story moving
From Rick: So far in this series, I’ve dealt with three aspects: (1) your story’s purpose in terms of what you want to convey to your reader (2) keeping the reader with you in terms of understanding the characters’ motives
Read moreSome excellent writing tips
From Rick: This week I’m going to divert from my “Analyzing your story” series to give you s short list of some excellent writing tips I recently got from my local writer’s group. Before I get to that, I want
Read moreGrammar and style tips for authors: Part 1—recent changes
From Rick: Being an editor, it’s important that I keep up to date on the latest grammar and style changes in the language, particularly since it seems to be changing very rapidly. There are two authoritative references that all writers
Read moreWriting software revisited—Part 1
From Rick: From time to time I’ve talked about various pieces of software for writers. Although I haven’t subdivided them before, all the ones I’ve seen fall into two primary categories: (1) Word and text processing software (2) Writing improvement
Read moreTips for self-editing your book
From Rick: You’ve probably heard it from many sources that writers should not edit their own books. Some of that advice comes from self-interested editors who want you to believe that in order to sell your their services. Some of
Read moreRed flags when choosing an editor
From Rick: Next week: Scott does Part 2 of his action scenes series. For this off week, I wanted to give you a couple of articles on a topic near and dear to my heart: Editors. A few years back
Read moreCleaning up your manuscript—Part 2
From Rick: In MANUSCRIPT CLEANUP-PART 1 I showed you how to clean up the most basic garbage in your manuscript file: extra spaces, errant tabs, and accidental linefeeds instead of paragraph returns. What you might find it interesting how many
Read moreCleaning up your manuscript—Part 1
From Rick: Back in 2013, I did a three-part series on formatting your manuscript. You can look these up under the topic FORMATTING in the categories on the left of the blog. I covered a lot of material in some
Read moreEditing your novel-7: Final thoughts
From Rick: Okay, so maybe I wasn’t done with this series, as I thought I was. I was going through my older emails this past week and I came across one article on this subject that I felt worth passing
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