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25 Ways Writers Can Impress a Publisher

For this week’s Throwback Thursday, we’re looking at an excerpt from a previous post titled 25 Tips on How to Impress a Book Publisher by publisher and best-selling author Cheryl Tardif.

Today I’ll be posting with my “publisher hat” on, and I’ll share with your readers 25 tips that will help you impress publishers and distinguish you and your work from the slush piles.  Continue Reading…

Balance Fact and Fiction When Writing Historical Novels

For this week’s Throwback Thursday, we’re looking at an excerpt from a previous post titled  Fact or Fiction? How Novelists Can Blend Factual Research with Creative Storytelling  by author Jack Woodville London.

Readers who have some passing knowledge of literature might be startled when in reading The Three Musketeers they encounter a passage in which D’Artagnan refers to Gulliver’s Travels. The dilemma is that The Three Musketeers is set more than a hundred years before Jonathan Swift wrote about Gulliver. Alexandre Dumas got it wrong.

On the other hand, no one came nearer to getting it right than Patrick O’Brian. His seafaring novels highlight practices of gammoning and warping the futtocks, details that tend to overshadow the writing that brought such terms our way.

The Three Musketeers is undeniably a classic; The Wine Dark Sea is the subject of much (unfair) criticism for burying a good story in unnecessary historical details. Continue Reading…

How Writers Can Benefit from Zero-Base Strategies

For this week’s Throwback Thursday, we’re looking at an excerpt from a previous post titled “Zero-Based Thinking” for Writers by Matthew Eaton.

What would you do if you had more time?

Would you use the extra time to improve your skills?

Would you spend it writing the next great novel?

Time is one of the only finite things in this world, and it is too precious to waste it on “time sinks” (those pet novels you can’t seem to give up on even after ten-plus years of slamming your head against the desk in frustration because you can’t complete it). You must evaluate your time usage with a new mind-set—one that will set you free and help you adjust to cutting your losses. Continue Reading…

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