From Nicola’s Elf
I have always had a tendency to anger. Some of it probably comes from my life “traumas” but some also comes from the fact that I have a frustration with problems I cannot solve, and an allergy to nasty, selfish, greedy, dishonest people, whose existence is increasingly visible in today’s hyper connected world.
Continue reading →I write steampunk fantasy romances. You ask what in the world is steampunk? Per the Urban Dictionary, steampunk is a subgenre of speculative fiction, usually set in an anachronistic Victorian or quasi-Victorian alternate historical setting. In other words, it’s what the past would look like if the future had happened sooner.
Continue reading →Back in the late nineties I had succumbed to a friend’s insistent urging to attend a weekend long, soul-searching, rather cultist self-growth retreat in an old Hollywood auditorium where a charismatic man badgered the audience for 48 hours straight allowing no sleep and little food, but promising that each participant would reach down inside and realize their core evasion to life authenticity. Why my friend had singled me out to attend, I did not ask, but I did survived the weekend and come away with some gems.
Well, the 2012 Mystery Writers Conference held at Book Passage in Corte Madera this last week comes as close to that experience as anything I can recall.
Continue reading →Key steps and references to help prepare for self publishing on Amazon Kindle and CreateSpace Print On Demand (POD)
I recently helped Nicola published her novel The Belvedere Club on both Amazon Kindle and CreateSpace Paperback POD.
Publishing on these two medium is not hard. If you are not the preparing type, you can just jump into each of the publishing steps on the respective sites below, and figure it out as you go. The process does not have to be done all in one go. You can stop at any step, figure things out and get back to it when you’re ready.
If you are the preparing type and want to go through the process smoothly, there are many online resources to help you prepare for it. However, after having gone through that process, the information out there is all over the place. If I had had a simple logical outline, of all the things that needed to be done and prepared before going through the process, it would have made our life easier and saved us a lot of back and forth.
This is an attempt at providing such an outline 
Although short stories, novels, and plays all integrate character, setting, plot, and conflict, I’ve experienced that the skills needed to succeed in these three forms of literature are uniquely different.
Continue reading →Myths. One of the great myths is that anyone can write, draw, paint, sculpt, sing, dance, or act. Mechanically, technically, probably yes. Creatively, no.
There was a time when we believed that anyone could do anything in the creative arts, given the appropriate training and inspiration to nurture obvious talent, and to bring latent talent to the surface.
Continue reading →I decided to chronicle my journey as a writer into the world of Kindle. Mind you, I am no expert on E-book publishing and am just now getting my feet wet on this new paradigm I know will dominate the book industry in the years to come. Actually, we may be talking a year or few short ones at the most. Statistics produced by AAP indicate a 117% increase in Ebook sales in 2011 while adult hardcover and adult paperback sales lost 17.5% and 15.6% respectively.
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