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 →Creamy Apple Pie
In honor of the posting of my new short story–The Language of Love–this blog will be dedicated to one of those things I love most in life: Food. This recipe was given to me by a dear friend who lives in Montreal. It has become a favorite of my family. As someone who doesn’t like cooked apples, I have to tell you this pie is delicious.
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 →My last blog was about Voice. This week, I want to talk about Voice’s alter ego, Style. Can you have one without the other? Not really. Yin/Yang. Light/Dark. You see where I’m going.
As writers, we create our art with words. Which words we choose and how we string them together in phrases is our style. We might try to be as concise as possible and write: The girl sits in the chair.
Continue reading →Writers often hear remarks like: you haven’t found your voice, or you need to develop your voice, or preferably, I like the voice of this piece.
So what is voice? Think of all the contestants of American Idol singing the same song, for example Otis Redding’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
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 
