by Andrea Lundgren

I’ve been thinking about how we humans clean things up. Sometimes, we do it begrudgingly, sometimes compulsively. How we feel (and how close we are to a deadline) usually determines whether our efforts are frantic or methodical. When rushed or pressured, we can get rid of stuff we really should’ve kept, and I think this applies to editing, too.

Trump signed an executive order earlier this week that did … nothing.  Nonetheless, that didn’t stop him from preening and patting himself on the back.  While thousands of children remain terrified and separated from their parents, held in old warehouses, tent cities, and wherever the U.S. government can find room to stow them.

Administration officials admit that there is no immediate plan to reunite these children with their families.  Melania Trump visits them wearing a jacket that says, “I don’t care, do U?”  Fox television host Brian Kilmeade says we should not be concerned because “These aren’t our kids … it’s not like he is doing this to the people of Idaho or, uh, or, uh, Texas. These are people from another country.” Members of Congress, congressional candidates, and the press have been denied entry to tour the facilities.  A senator was escorted from the premises by police…

Whoa, just look at that flowchart! That’s way too many steps!

Why, yes. Yes, it very likely is.

Few self-published authors can afford all of these editorial production steps. Few would want to even if they could.

But the truth is that this does mirror the traditional editorial and revision process.

If a publishing company that’s banking its profits on producing quality books goes through all of these steps, a self-publisher with a personal stake in their product should make a pretty good effort to replicate that process.

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The super-duper secret behind this flowchart

Down by where I work a Toys r Us is in the process of shutting down. Big signs in the front windows say that there’s only seven more days left. Until recently, I had only been inside one time. This was back shortly after Star Wars: Episode I came out in 1999 and it had every Star Wars book, toy, and collectible imaginable filled the shelves. Every other commercial back then seemed to remind us all that we were Toys r Us kids, and just about every child’s favorite animal from the earliest age was a giraffe.

Walking through the store almost twenty years later, it’s shelves bare and no employee seeming to give a damn about their jobs as the end drew near, I almost choked up. It had never been a big part of my life; I remember my brother and I every time we passed by the…

by Michael Cristiano

Not being able to write is a sad fact of life for a writer. There’s laundry to do, there’s food to cook, there’s sleep to be had. Worse, I have this pesky illness that eats up a lot of my time. I toil day in and day out to keep it at bay and under control. Sometimes, it creeps into my evenings, just when I think I’ve escaped. Worse, the horror of it all often keeps me awake at night and the dread fills my dreams with terror and sadness.

Oh, I’m not sick… I have a 9-to-5 job.

I recently reached my 1000th follower here on CrapPile, and ever since it started to take off a few weeks ago people have been amazed at its growth and begging to know what my secrets are. I always answer that they’re not really secrets, just plain ordinary blogging techniques that just seem to work right for me. Luck also has a lot to do with it, I think.

But now that I’ve surpassed the 1000 follower mark and did so two days shy of my month of blogging, I want to share somethings that I did that may or may not work for everybody but that I feel helped my blog grow as good and as fast as it did.

1) A Good Title

I wrote and entire post on this pointer before, but I strongly feel that an interesting, catchy title will help draw readers to your blog. Before…

I’ve been a little busy the last few months and have revisited some of my favorite posts. I hope you enjoy this one. Most of the concepts I write about are simple. I just never really gave them a lot of thought before I started writing my novel.

When writing, remember less is more. Stay away from qualifiers. They weaken your prose, and the result is the exact opposite of what your were trying to achieve. I know why you use them. I’m hooked on ‘very’. Other people are hooked on the word ‘too’. If you are resorting to qualifiers for emphasis, odds are, you are using the wrong word in the first place.

These qualifiers are the words your English teacher dreaded seeing, such as very, too, really, and sort of. When you overuse these words, your writing will seem lazy, as if you haven’t taken the time…

We here at The Library Ladies are occasionally approached by readers with questions and suggestions about things that we could write about on this blog. While it’s true that reviews and reader’s advisory are some of the main points that we like to make here, we also try to keep up with current trends in the library world. Something that is becoming more and more prevalent within literary circles and realities is the concept of self publishing. Some authors decide to take the route of publishing and promoting their work on their own, and with more and more services cropping up it is becoming more and more common. One question raised is how do libraries factor into this newish trend? How can self-published authors get their books into libraries?

Okay, honesty time! I am neither a cataloger or a selector at the library that I work for, so this is…