From Rick: Mark Twain’s essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” is famous both for its typical Twain humor and for Twain’s rules for good writing. I’ve mentioned this essay before. You can do a Google search for it, or you can
Read moreFrom Rick: This week I promised no rants. So, no rants. No promises about next week though. We’ve all heard a line on TV or in a movie, or we’ve read one in a book that makes us think “That’s
Read moreFrom Rick: I’m sure our blog readers will at once notice that the blog looks a lot different. I had to do an update to the software on the site and the old template I had used for many years
Read moreFrom Rick: This week’s post is going to be relatively short because it’s designed to make you think about your story, ask questions about it, and to help you analyze it for effectiveness. Keep in mind that because each story
Read moreFrom Rick: In Part One (link below for your convenience), I talked about some of the wrong thinking indie authors made in the beginning of the new wave of self-publishing that some have called the “self-publishing revolution.” INDIE PUBLISHING: ARE
Read moreFrom Rick: One of the joys of being an editor is that I often get to read some great books and stories sometimes before anyone else has seen them. It’s even more exciting when I get to read work from
Read moreFrom Rick: In late 2007, with the advent of Kindle Direct Publishing, the self-publishing landscape forever changed. Many authors embraced this new publishing world and grew with it as it has changed over the years since. Some have been slow
Read moreFrom Rick: In Part 1 of this two-part series I discussed subject, object, and possessive (genitive) pronouns. You might want to check that out if you missed it. In that post I mentioned seeing sentences like the following: “I think
Read moreFrom Rick: Last time I talked about nouns and the issues we might run into with them when it comes to figuring out verb agreements. Most of us won’t have a problem with the following sentence: The legal team at
Read moreFrom Rick: In a recent post, I talked about some of the style changes in the latest edition (17th) of the Chicago Manual of Style: GRAMMAR AND STYLE TIPS-PART 1 In this post I’m going to talk about some problems
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