Short Story - Tourist Season

Just added another short story to my Authors Den page. It received an Honorable Mention in the Writers of the Future contest last year.

Follow the link at the left to Authors Den and you can probably find it either by searching on my name or its title.

Happy reading.

Broken Link to "The Dreamer Gambit"

I have noticed in several places that the website address of Write Words, Inc., shows up misspelled. Unfortuantely, the misseplling began with the article in the Naperville Sun a few weeks ago. I am hoping that another post here will help lead people to the correct information.

The website for Write Words, Inc. is ebooksonthe.net. (The broken link has ...onteh.net.)

Now Available at Fictionwise

The Dreamer Gambit is now available at Fictionwise. Here is the link and it is also at the left.

Fictionwise

Short Story - Second Coming

Please visit Authors Den to read my short story that just won semifinalist standing the the L.. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest.

Here is a link. Authors Den Stories.

Should this link fail, click on the link to the left on this page for Authors Den, change the category to Science Fiction, and then click on the Stories tab. You should be able to find it by my name or by its title.

A New Writing Credit!

Just received an email today from the Writers of the Future Contest. My latest entry was selected as a Semi-Finalist, one of 10 stories in that category. (Above that is the Finalist category from which the prize winners are chosen.)

I will be receiving a critique of the story from one of the judges. Got a great idea for another entry for the next quarter, too.

Tools for Writers

I've been working on polishing another manuscript before trying to get it published, and as I near the end of a first read-through, I thought I would post information about a great tool I found for editing. At one time, I considered how I would write a program to do this, but then I found a website which offered exactly what I wanted for free!

It's from the site of Roger J. Carlson where in his TechTips section, he offers tools for editing. My favorite is the Word Frequency Counter. You can list words in your manuscript you do NOT want to count, but then the program runs through the whole book and counts how many times each word is used and how close together they appear. For example, if you used the word "seriously" fifteen times and the closest they appear is six words apart, you might want to take a look at that word (using the find function of your word processor). Editors, publishers, and agents jump all over repetition of words.

And speaking of editing, there's a book I found some time ago called "Write In Style" by Bobbie Christmas of Zebra Communications. It's a small book with a lot of information about editing. Her free download articles have a lot of value too. Here's the link:  Bobbie Christmas at Zebra Editor.

New Link - Author's Den

I just set up a page at http://www.authorsden.com/, a site where authors can showcase their works and readers can search, browse, and interact with them. It's free to set up with a minimum level of services (a bio, a photo, a book listing); increased services available at a price. Hoping to see new visitors here on my page as a result. I have also added the address in the Links section here.