Have you ever heard someone refer to writing as elegant. It’s orderly and graceful. It flows.

By adding elegance to your writing, you can turn clear, precise, but clunky prose into a musical composition.

Elegance gives your writing a tangible feeling of beauty. It makes people say wow. Elegance isn’t just the wording, but the way it is presented.

Is your style disciplined and orderly, or is it inconsistent? Presentation elegance requires consistency from the beginning of your novel to the end.

When you use dashes, do you leave spaces between the words or not?

•  second-handed
• second – handed

When you write titles of books, do you italicize or enclose using quotation marks?

• Little Women
• “Little Women”
• ‘Little Women’

Do you use the oxford comma to separate the last item in a list?

• She brought apples, bananas, and grapes to the picnic.
• She brought apples, bananas and grapes to the…

Greetings to all the Archer’s Aim readers. I hope everyone had a good Memorial day weekend. Everyone in my part of the country is dealing with the tropical storm and all the associated rain, so our weekend was a little up and down. Anyway, I thought that today I would share a little more behind-the-scenes of what it’s like being an author.

Many authors like me work a day job so we don’t have all day to spend on our writing. For self published authors, there are a lot of tasks that go into writing beyond merely getting words onto paper. We have to spend a precious allotment of time on other details including artwork, marketing, blogging and much more. So that can add a self published author’s plate on any given day.

Since I’m now dictating my newest books, my writing day begins with dictation into a recording device…

by Ryan Lanz

I love the show Survivor. I know, I know. It’s a guilty pleasure.

I’m a bit of a junkie for the show. I’ve probably seen 90% of the episodes since it started 57 years ago (ish). May Jeff Probst never retire. I was wondering to myself why I love the show so much. Sure, the scenery is beautiful, and the challenges are fun to watch. But plenty of shows have that sort of thing. Then it hit me: the conflict. Survivor is rife with conflict. People are selected from different walks of life and put together as strangers in a high stress environment. Shenanigans ensue.

Hello to all the story Empire readers. I hope everyone had a good Memorial day weekend. For those of us not on vacation, it’s been back to work and with that in mind I thought I would provide a few writing-tips to get the most out of your dictation.

One of the main reasons to begin using the dictation as a writing tool is because of workload. In my case, my new job reduced my ability to accomplish enough writing so dictation became necessary. Otherwise, you may find that your writing demands have increased and you simply must accomplish more in the available time. Here are some ways to transition to dictation that I found helpful.

Follow a Script

When I began using Dragon several months ago, I quickly realized there was more to dictation than simply speaking words into a microphone. Without some preparation, I tended to have numerous…

Hold on a sec, I got some thoughts about your memoir

You open your email, and O frabjous day! A publisher has come calling! They’ve seen your work in a literary magazine and wonder if you have a chapbook, or would like to be in their anthology.  Or you didn’t win a contest, but your work “shows merit” and “deserves to be published.” Maybe you wanted a faster process than querying agents, or figured your work better suited a small press, so you cast out to a few publishers, and one has bitten.

You read a little further. This publishing house “considers work for both traditional and hybrid publishing.” If your book is seen as better suited to a hybrid deal—perhaps due to “the difficulty in placing the books of new or untried authors, as well as the general increased competition in publishing today”—the publisher feels “that it may…

As many of you know, in my day job I work as a web developer. Most of my skills I’ve picked up in the past 25 years of web design, from Internet marketing to social media, have proven useful once I started writing. One of them was logo design: I’ve helped a number of clients with their logos; something that is often a slow, arduous process.

Well, no more! I was recently approached by a company called DesignEvo to test-drive their online logo designer and I was amazed. Within seconds, I designed my first logo. Thay have a gazillion templates and graphics to choose from, making the process as painless as you can possibly imagine. Best of all, they store your logos for you so you can edit them in the future, should you (or a client) decide on, say, a new color.

So, are you interested in a…

Digital Social Me – Do I Have Choice?

Social Identity: ‘The recognition of one’s potential and qualities as an individual, especially in relation to social context:

Caring can become the defining characteristic of women’s self-identity.’

Other forms of social identity are how one is recognized in the sporting world, whether as a player or a spectator. How one is accepted by their peers, such as school, family, work, religion, cults, sports, hobbies etc. Even how one is amongst others that simply share their place on the planet. Social identity is how one is perceived by others, and even more importantly how one is perceived by ‘themselves’ in their social circle. ‘Socialization’ enables us to fit into social groups and make adjustments to new situations’ Poole, M & Germov.

The Digital Self
Then there is the ‘Digital Identity’ Deborah Lupton states, ‘Accessing our news, music, television, films via digital platforms and…

A book review — your opinion about a book based on evidence from it. We’ve seen them on Amazon and Goodreads. We may have even read a few… but are we writing them, too?

Wait? Writing a book review? I can’t do that. I don’t know how to do that… Please don’t ask me! Please!

But you can! I promise. (If you want to, that is…) All you need is a little bit of time and a book… I’ll take you through the “Why,” the “What,” and the “How” of writing a review.

Why should I?

Before we get into the how, let’s discuss the why. Why should I write a book review? Why does it matter if I write a review? Why do authors care about reviews? Why do readers care about reviews?

I’ll let a few authors tell you the answers to these questions!

• Book reviews bring in…