If you decide to independently publish, it’s critical to have multiple sets of eyes review your work before pulling the trigger. I strongly recommend hiring a professional creative editor and a professional copy editor. If you don’t have the budget for either, solicit input from friends, coworkers, or anyone else willing to help for nothing more than your gratitude and a signed copy of your book.…
Hire an Editor
I think there are better ways. Contact me if you want to learn about another option.
From an op-ed article on winter –
After the sledding, we went to the kitchen to rustle up some combustibles.
I don’t know what they were eating, but I’m glad I wasn’t there to witness it.
From a restaurant ad –
Try gathering in the comfy seating around a coffee table and filling it with small plates from the lounge menu while coifing generous pours of thoughtful wine.
Unless that wine comes with hair extensions, I don’t think so. I do wonder how wine shows its thoughtfulness. My beverages have never shown me an ounce of consideration.
A conference for readers and writers coming to Akron in September – more info to come.
Deception Point by Dan Brown
You might like it, if you are as dumb as the heroine.
To buy into this story you have to believe the heroine, who works in DC distilling intelligence reports into briefs, is so dumb that she constantly has to ask dopey questions because she can’t grasp what is going on around her or what anyone is saying. And she has to ask these dumb questions because the author thinks the reader is equally dumb and has to be lead by the hand to understand everything. Cut out the excessive explanations, the perpetual reviews of the action, and the ever-present (bad) foreshadowing (i.e. “He wasn’t worried. Yet.” “If only she had known what was ahead.”) and the book would be half the size but twice as good. I kept asking myself – how did he convince someone to publish this? Save your money. Angels and Demons is much better than this.
~The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury
Mr. Khoury – Stick with Screenwriting
Putting aside the basic premise of the book and the Templar mystery, this book is poorly written and annoying. I wanted my red pencil as I was reading it – poorly constructed sentences, large expository sections that seemed inserted solely to show the writer’s research, characters so illogical they could never have had the careers assigned them. There are so many points in the book where the suspension of disbelief is simply impossible. Oh, the next piece of the puzzle is under this man-made lake? Let’s just put on these handy wetsuits and retrieve it. Oh, it looks like we need to visit Turkey – no passport, no problem, just hop on the plane. The archeologist has some cognitive dissonance about the contents of her 2000 year old find – let’s just get rid of it. Each of the final few chapters ends with a ridiculous cliff-hanger. Maybe it works for TV but it only had me guffawing. Absolutely not worth buying.
~
RIP Singular First Person Objective Pronoun. Apparently Me has passed on, overcome by misuse of Singular First Person Subjective Pronoun. Witness “between you and I”, “to my friend and I” and “from John and I”. Me was predeceased by Adjectives Describing To Be, who were defeated by Well, and Poorly.
