Identify what you’re good at and grow stronger.

That’s right. We stand a little taller and walk with confidence when we’re proud of something. So play to your strong stuff.It’s also important to think about our weaknesses.

Me, my biggest weakness is tenses. I mix up the present and past tense all the time. Can’t help it so I’ve learned to accept this as a flaw and seek out help from grammar experts. Oh spelling, I’m terrible at spelling. Thank God for spell check.

A strength, imagination. I have a vivid imagination. Some of the crap that pops in my mind would get me committed to a state institution if I shared it all. LOL

But another weakness I have is finishing the damn story.

I’ve dozens of story starts, but like a coon dog with a good nose, I run off every time the wind blows a scent my way. There…

I’m sure you’re familiar with the African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child”! Ideally, it takes that same village to help a writer promote his books. With a plethora of books from every genre known to man, and a few new ones like Psionic, it’s getting progressively difficult to compete in a glutted market.

In aneffortto garner a following, manyindependent authors have opted to give our books away for free. Middlemen, who have no literary talents, have become wealthy in our business by virtue of the book giveaway companies they’ve formed. They advertise our hard work and offer it to the public for free. To register with the morefamous of these companies, we must pay them for the privilege of giving away our blood, sweat, and tears.

I’m not blaming readers, since I’ve snagged a few of these freebies myself, but this is not always beneficial…

A little power is a dangerous thing, and certain punctuation has power.

Exclamation points!

Em dashes—

Ellipses…

These are all wonderful, fun things to play with, but making too free with the power punctuation makes the narrative too breathless, or in the case of ellipses, too slow. When prose is well written, it conveys the excitement of the moment without force. A good author doesn’t resort to creating excitement with the overuse of exclamation points as this makes the narrative breathless. It tells the reader what to think, rather than showing them a scene that is exciting.

When I am laying down the first draft, I am just as guilty of filling the manuscript with exclamations, em dashes, and ellipses.  I am in a rush to get the ideas down on paper, so in some places, this is a subconscious shorthand for the second draft, which is where I take those

This is a guest post by Loris Watts, an experienced freelance writer, college ranking expert, and blogger while being a lecturer in several high school institutions. His years of experience in writing articles and essays have helped him hone his writing skills. He currently collaborates with best essay writing service, an online writing firm.

How Writing Can Help You Improve Your Awareness Skills

Awareness is an important skill: it is crucial for us to reflect on who we are, to know our strengths and weaknesses, to understand our drives and personalities, and to recognize our habits and values. Awareness offers us the mental capacity to identify who and what we are. As we develop our awareness skills we become capable of making improvements and changes in our own thoughts. We become better at understanding the people around us, make better decisions regarding our daily life, and are more aware of…

I’ve been scared of heights my entire life.

Mostly cliffs and steep stairways, steep hills, things like that.  It makes my knees go all watery when I look at pictures of that city in China, the one that’s all built on a cliffside and is nothing but dizzying views of the valley floor, far, far below.

It even makes me nervous to look at rock climbers when they are dangling from some difficult rock face.

At a writer’s retreat, I wrote the following passage:

What is it like, not to be afraid? I’ve never known. Among the planar ferns, carpeted with dew- bedazzled moss and roofed with maple clerestory, I’m fine. Or, watching mist-silvered ripples run cross mossy swells of granite. Or ranging mile on mile through fir and cedar pillars, hot pitch perfume rising to my nose. It’s easy to forget when things are comfortable.

But venturing along a…

I often wonder
How you could wear a smile so graceful
Without a “care” in the world
How you could strike a pose so beautiful
Without holding back
I have wondered if I could…
Only for a second take your seat
Pose that pose andSmile that smile?

But,
I know that I couldn’t
I wouldn’t be able to
I couldn’t have your kind of courage
I couldn’t wear your kind of smile
I couldn’t lighten up a room
I couldn’t smile so effortlessly
making history for decades.

Dear Mona Lisa,
I wish I knew….
Just wish I knew what you knew
That caused you
To just be 
In that moment
That we all still gaze at?

Susan McMillan

Lisa del Giocondo

Hi Story Empire fans, Craig here again. I’m pre-writing this so I don’t know when it will post as it references my process. The big point is I have two books that are very close to being released. One or both may be available when this posts.

Being a self publisher gives a tremendous amount of freedom, but it also comes with all of the work. I thought you might like a peek at what I go through to bring one of my books out. Warning: If you hadn’t noticed before, my process is a kind of organized chaos, so I may wander a bit in this post.

The starting point for me is a finished first draft. This needs to go in the vault for a number of weeks before I attempt any personal edits. In most cases, the draft has been through a brutal critique group and those…