Seven Ways to Conquer Fear

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“You have to go to school,” my father ordered. My 12-year-old heart beat fast with worry. Just off the airplane from Bolivia, I knew no English. And America was too big, too different, and strange. Weeks of anxiety at school made the adjustment harder. But what paralyzed me with fear were the relay races in which I was told to participate. The distance I’d have to run between the starting point and the next runner where I’d hand off the baton made my stomach cramp. With each new race, I anguished—what if I should stumble or drop the baton? What…

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Picture It? Perfect!

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Hello! Maureen Pratt here to bring another blog post to you. This time, I’m going to continue along the theme I began last month and talk more about capturing the visual aspects of writing – how working with a camera when you are writing can help you bring dazzling details to your work of fiction or non-fiction.   Sometimes, when we write (particularly fiction, but also nonfiction), we think that our work has to come from our imaginations. This is, of course, true to a point. But in order to make a place come alive to the reader, we have…

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What’s Your Marketing To-Do List for 2013?

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Hi all. Pamela S. Meyers here with another post on marketing your books. We are nearing the end of another year, and I’ve been thinking about what kind of New Year’s resolutions we authors can make as they relate to marketing. Happy day after Christmas! If you’re not out shopping the bargains, now is the perfect time to put those marketing goals into place. What they might be depends on if you just had a book release, or have one coming up in the new year. In my case, my Love Finds You in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin is releasing April…

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Dissecting Your Novel – Part 2

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  Wishing you Christmas blessings from Gail Gaymer Martin at www.gailgaymermartin.com Drop by and see my lovely new website. On November 9, Dissecting Your Novel – Part 1 covered three aspects of editing your own work with a fresh look to tighten and brighten your novels. The elements I covered were: Motivation-reaction unit, cause/effect arrangement of sentences, and the plight of using adverbs. This post will continue with the last three elements:   Placing the most important/emphatic in a sentence. Margie Lawson, Lawson Writer’s Academy http://www.margielawson.com/ and Strunk & White, The Elements of Style Use beats instead of tags. Browne…

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Perchance to Dream by Christine Lindsay

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Often when I see only a glimpse of a scene, or a reflection in glass, it strikes me as a doorway to another world—a magical place I long to go. The same sort of feeling a favorite book does for me—like Heidi taking me up the Swiss Alps, or Ash and Anjuli-Bai from Far Pavilions whisking me off to long-ago India. From my living room couch I can look into my kitchen and see the glass door to the pantry. This is often what I see when I’m having my devotions, while I have a cup of tea in my…

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PUGS Pointers #16

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Hi! I’m Kathy Ide. In addition to being a published author, I’m a full-time professional freelance editor. For CAN, I’m blogging about "PUGS"–Punctuation, Usage, Grammar, and Spelling…tips for writers based on the most common mistakes I see in the manuscripts I edit. Each blog post will have one tip for each of the four categories. (For more PUGS tips, check out my website, www.KathyIde.com, or get a copy of my book Polishing the PUGS (available through the website or at the conferences where I teach). If you’re interested in working with a freelance editor (or know someone who is), e-mail me through the…

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Tips from the Pros: Dianne Neal Matthews

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Greetings from Sarah Sundin on a drizzly day in northern California. As the year draws to a close, we begin to plan for the coming year. What a wonderful time to feature Dianne Neal Matthews, the author of four daily devotionals! Her newest offering, Designed for Devotion: A 365-Day Journey from Genesis to Revelation, just released, and it looks like a fabulous way to tour the Bible in 2013. Dianne, how did you get into writing? I always fantasized about being a writer but didn’t do anything about it. Then in my mid-forties, I began writing occasional articles for my church’s…

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Tis the Season to Give

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Cheri Cowell here: Christmas is the season of giving, and as people who carry Christmas all year, let’s talk about how we can be giving people all year—and how giving makes good marketing sense. It may be the best way to make money. Sounds crazy, I know, but read through these ideas and see if any stir your imagination and your heart. Then give them a try. You’ll find the biblical principle of giving works even in marketing—because what we offer can have an eternal impact. Begin by thinking of the kinds of things you can create. Tips sheets, short…

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