Vertigo

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Does life have you running at a dizzying pace? Mine does. In fact, I didn’t realize how busy I was
until this past Saturday morning when I experienced vertigo.

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Storm preparation for writers

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Aloha from Karen, Having survived Hurricane Andrew with half my house damaged and many items blown into the everglades, I know a little about what to expect from a hurricane. Irene is headed my way. It’s important back up files and take other steps.

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Toward Poetry Revival

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   I have loved poetry since the age of seventeen when I discovered Byron, Keats, and Shelley. As I matured, I came to love deeper masters like Virgil, Spenser, Donne, Milton, and Tennyson, as well as Homer and Dante in translation. But something bad happened to poetry about a hundred years ago, so that many of today's readers are completely turned off toward poetry. It doesn't have to be that way. In my CAN blogs I will encourage a revival of good-quality poetry that can be enjoyed by ordinary readers, and I'll describe and illustrate techniques that can make it…

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PUGS Pointers #1

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Karen Whiting graciously invited me to do a monthly CAN blog on PUGS Pointers and other editing tips. If you’re not familiar with the term, “PUGS” is my acronym for Punctuation, Usage, Grammar, and Spelling. In this blog, I’ll share tips on PUGS rules that writers struggle with most, based on my years as a professional freelance editor. I’ll also explain why it’s important for writers to polish their PUGS. Each monthly blog will address one item in each area. For more PUGS Pointers, see my website, www.KathyIde.com. Or you can get my book “Polishing the PUGS,” through the “Published…

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Growing Your Fiction Sales

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 Happy writing from Gail Gaymer Martin at www.gailmartin.com   Through the years, I’ve watched my friends use different strategies to help their fiction sales grow. Some work and some don’t, but the ones who’ve found success, provides us with lessons so that we might learn from them and try some of their techniques. Obviously sales grow most when your work is in the bookstores and when it is promoted and distributed by your publisher. So this means, mainly working with traditional publishers. Mine put my novels in store—book stores, grocery stores, super marts, and any place books are sold. They…

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By the Numbers

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Hi, all! Ava Pennington here from sunny Florida…well, mostly sunny Florida. The afternoon rainstorms have finally started, to the residents’ joy and the tourists’ chagrin! Lately, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between words and numbers in the publishing industry. I’m a writer, not a mathematician. I love words – their structure and style, their rhythm and rhyme. I enjoy alliteration and onomatopoeia. I’m drawn to the images that words evoke. Numbers…not so much. Still, serious writers know that publishing—even Christian publishing—is a business. And business is often about the numbers.

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A Labor of Love

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Dianne Neal Matthews with an encouraging word for the second Monday of the month. Ever since I attended my first conference, I’ve heard people compare writing a book to giving birth. The more I write, the more I see how appropriate that analogy can be.

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