Outside of the American Midwest, most people would not expect to find exceptional library design in Kansas City, Missouri. If they went to downtown Kansas City, however, those people might be surprised.

Back in 2003 and 2004, the Kansas City Public Library Board of Trustees decided to transform the Library District Parking Garage into a giant Community Bookshelf. The “shelf” contains 42 different titles suggested by local book lovers from poetry by Langston Hughes to works by Plato. Each of the book spines is around 25 feet tall and 9 feet wide.

I don’t normally consider parking garages to be beautiful, but with the creation of this Community Bookshelf, the folks in Kansas City have made something extraordinary. You can see a few images of it below.

I suppose it would be difficult to convince the library board in my city to do something similar, but I would love to see…

Microsoft Word is powerful software and generally the Indie author’s friend, but sometimes its intuitive automatic tweaking can cause headaches that can take days to get to the bottom of, and at other times lead to giving up on certain looks we want for our books altogether. Non-fiction books in particular regularly have bullet lists in them, and if you have lots of bulleted lists in any particular book you can end up with dodgy margins, among other unattractive changes.

It’s common knowledge among self-publishing authors that Word generated bullet lists and Kindle books are not the best of friends. The easiest ways around this are to either to manually insert bullet symbols at the beginnings of each sentence of the list, or to create the lists as images in software built for the purpose, or to use Canva or some similar online image creation site. Here’s an example of…

Today as I revised my novel, I noticed something that should have leaped off the page during past reviews, but didn’t. I am having a love affair with ‘ing’. These ‘ing’ words are all over the place.

I stopped the revision process and did some research on ‘ing’. I remembered reading somewhere, that the overuse of ‘ing’ words was not a good thing.

Opportunities to overuse the ‘ing’ word are boundless. There are nouns, adjectives, verbs, and even verbs masquerading as nouns called gerunds, all ending in ‘ing’.

So what’s the big deal? What’s wrong with ‘ing’ words?

The overuse of ‘ing’ words mark you as an amateur – Don’t be alarmed if you see more than a handful on one page. Do take a closer look if you see more than a handful in a single paragraph.

While wrapping a soothing sling around the fledgling’s broken wing, Diana was humming, dreaming of her prince charming…

I had originally queued up this post with the thought of talking railing on about the seeming lack of compassion, sensitivity, concern – for their fellow human beings and the world at large – I’ve been witnessing for some time now from people everywhere (and not just politicians but also those close to home) who should definitely know better.

I decided instead to give you some examples of the ways average people, no matter what their income or expertise, can help others – even if it’s just a matter of including those others in our lives and making them feel welcome and wanted. I also added a video among these examples about helping the animals of the world, because we do share this planet, you know.

Personally, here are ways I have helped others …

For some years, I have promoted other authors free on my blogs. I’ve given them…

Time seems to be passing more quickly these days. I’ve been actually going out and choosing to live my life knowing how precious it can be and how quickly it can all be taken away.  I’ve been saying “yes” more, and leaving the relative comfort of my bedroom to actively participate in “the real world”.  (The “downside” to this, is that by actually doing things, I have less time to write about them, which is why my posts have been so sporadic lately.)

It’s as if I am finally pulling myself free of the viscous quagmire called grief.  Prying its cold fingers from around my heart (and ankles) and escaping its paralyzing grip.  Not that I can ever really be completely unburdened of it, but it seems that I have a bit more control over it all now.

I’m not foolish enough to think that it is something that I…