by Yvonne Perry

Have you had your flu vaccine? That seems to be the question of the month. After waiting in line for three and a half hours, I learned that the vaccine is not fully effective for two weeks after injection. Well, I got mine just days before boarding a crowded airplane headed for the Caribbean island of Dominican Republic. Our vacation was fabulous, and I got to do something I've always wanted to do: swim with dolphins! By the way, I highly recommend the Paradisus Palma Real. It's absolutely beautiful. We are selling our week of time share at the Royal Floridian in Ormond Beach, Florida. Let me know if you are interested in purchasing it. We plan to purchase two weeks closer to home so we can take our family with us next year on vacation.

I do apologize if you have tried to reach me and I have not responded. Before going on my trip, I drove to Atlanta to see about my grandmother (Nanny), who was in the hospital. I was on red alert the entire time I was in Puntacana and had limited access to Internet in which to keep up with folks back home. During that time, Nanny was sent home from the hospital because there was nothing more that can be done to help her recover. As you can well imagine, my mother, who has been caring for Nanny non-stop, is exhausted. After being out of my office for eight days, I traveled thirteen hours home to Nashville on Saturday. I unpacked, did laundry, repacked, and drove to Atlanta the next day. I am typing this while sitting by my grandmother's bedside—hopefully comforting her and helping my mom. Thank goodness for www.gotomypc.com! I can get a some work done from here.

My 25-year-old step-daughter-in-law, Katie is the virtual administrative for the WITS team. She is having an arteriogram on October 19. If it confirms renal artery stenosis, her doctor will install a stent to open the artery instead of having her on BP meds for the rest of her life. We appreciate all the love and prayers you are providing for us.

Boy, do I have a story about my Sid book's ISBN! I'm using Lightning Source (LS) to print the book and the ISBN I gave them was available on my list/log at Bowker.com. After ordering my proof, I went to Amazon.com to see if my book had been submitted, and guess what? The Sid book ISBN brings up my book on death and afterlife. In fact, my death and afterlife book has two ISBNs! I've emailed LS, Booksurge (who published my first book), Bowker, and Amazon. Booksurge/Amazon wants me to assign a new ISBN to the Sid book. That means I'll have to purchase another bulk from Bowker.com. I will have to pay $80 to upload new files to LS. I hope that sharing this information will help you avoid costly mistakes like this.

I’m looking for people who are interested in being part of my virtual blog tour for The Sid Series. I can provide you with material to post on your writing or children-themed blog or in your newsletter. I'm also looking for podcast and radio interview opportunities. If you are interested in having me speak about the publishing process, please let Katie know.

My step-daughter, Ryah, and her fiancé, Fred, are the caboose in the four-boy train of newborns being delivered to our family this year. Their son, Payton, is due in a matter of weeks. By the way, did you see the Chicago Bears quilt I made for him? While we’re sharing photos, you might like to see who the stork has brought us so far in 2009. 

I’ve been mentoring Michelle McPeters in my writing class on starting a freelance writing business. The first assignment was to write her own bio using a list of questions I gave her. Check out her bio. She did a great job, don’t you think? If you would like more information about the classes I teach, please let me know.

If you need a professional eye to review your term paper or English essay before submitting it to your professor, WITS team member Sarah Moore is offering academic editing and one-on-one tutoring for college and high school students. Sarah is a former high school and college teacher who has taught courses in research and writing. While she can help you make your college or graduate school application essay as strong as possible, she will not write the paper for you. She will mark all spelling and grammar errors as well as offer extensive comments and suggestions concerning the structure and overall quality of your writing.

I’ve been working with Allison Maslan on her January book launch for Blast Off! The Surefire Success Plan to Launch Your Dreams into Reality. The book outlines a clear-cut guide to infuse prosperity into your own career or business, finances, relationships, health, personal fulfillment, and spiritual life. Anyone who purchases Allison’s book on January 19, 2010 will get some awesome thank you gifts. If you would like a reminder to know when the book is available, you may register your interest and see a list of the gifts at http://www.myblastoff.com/booklaunch/. Feel free to let others know how they can participate and get these great prizes.

This issue of Writers in the Sky E-zine has some informative articles that I think you will enjoy. Thank you, Barbara Milbourn for proofreading this issue.

If someone forwarded this issue to you or if you stumbled upon this Web page, you may get your own subscription for free!

WITS Web site: http://www.writersinthesky.com
WITS Blog: http://www.writersintheskyblog.com/
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by Lillian Brummet

Developing a strong networking system with reliable contacts is the key to any marketing plan – yet one of the most difficult and time consuming tasks that an author will face. While it is true that a contact list can take years to develop, if done correctly you will have a team of individuals across the globe who are hungry for news about you and who volunteer to share information about your work through their circles.

How does one go about creating a contact list?

First you must decide whom you wish to work with and that requires much thought on key words to use in your searches and feeling out the industry to see where your work fits in. Once you have these initial steps done, you can begin approaching people that have a similar audience. But don’t just start sending query letters in a willy-nilly fashion. Really think about how this particular outlet could help you, who their audience is and how you can provide interesting tools or material for them. This will get the attention of the owner/editor of the outlet, however to really build a relationship you need to offer something – usually something greater or equal to what you are hoping to get from them.

When I approach a media outlet of any kind or an organization I want to network with I consider what their audience will get out of it AND let them know how I intend to drive traffic their way. For instance, I would mention that I will promote the event to my contacts via social networking sites, the Brummet’s monthly newsletter, our Conscious Discussions Blog, our radio shows, Web sites, forums, book tour site, etc.

Remember to keep your initial query email as brief as possible and don’t send along attachments. Write a paragraph or two and close with your signature and Web site address. Most magazine editors, for instance, give a letter less than ten seconds perusal and if it doesn’t catch their attention it is trashed. So be brief, concise and make sure that you offer your main Web site address where ALL your information should be available. This way, all they have to do is click to find out more about you – rather than reading a huge email with pages attached.

Contact lists can be used again and again…

My contact list did not get as strong as it is without a lot of effort, patience and time. You see, simply getting exposure with an organization’s newsletter (as an example) is not enough. That is just one little achievement. In my experience, the real bonus comes in over the next few years as you continually touch base with your list of contacts offering them new articles, new content, new resources, and so on. As the years go by I might use their Web sites or publications as resources in upcoming articles, I might mention their achievements or help promote their events through my blog or radio show.

Yet, just mentioning them is not enough–you have to let them know about your efforts to promote their work too. So send a little note via email notifying them of the exposure you have given them with a closing comment about how much you appreciate their work, or their support of you. This creates a working relationship with your contacts and pretty soon they are recommending guests for your radio show, resources for your blog, sending you Web sites that might increase publicity for your work and so on. Perhaps the contacts you have will suggest exchanging promotional materials, they may invite you to a variety of events or ask you to supply an article… (like the one you are reading today) - the opportunities here are endless.

NOW you have a working relationship with your contact list that you can continually refer to for the rest of your career. The key to any marketing plan is developing relationships – a strong support system like this can be relied on for the duration of your career. People you met 10 years ago will be there for you in the future… and this is an encouraging feeling for an author who’s trying to stand out like a purple snowflake in a snowstorm of other authors.

~ Lillian Brummet: book reviewer – Author of the books Trash Talk, Purple Snowflake Marketing, and Towards Understanding; Host of both the Conscious Discussions talk radio show and Authors Read radio program (www.brummet.ca)

Do You Want More for Your Marketing Dollars?

WITS publicity is an affordable and effective source for marketing your book or business.

• Article Marketing • Author Interviews • Personal & Business Bios • Blogging Services • Book Reviews • Media Kits • Media Releases • Podcast Interviews • Résumés • Sell Sheets • Ghostwriting • Editing

Choose two or more services and get a 10% discount on the total project price if you mention seeing this ad in our newsletter!

A great deal for anyone needing online publicity!

by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Author of The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success

1. Keep it simple. "He said" and "She said" will usually do. Your reader is trained to accept this repetition.

2. Forget you ever heard of strong verbs. Skip the "He yelped" and the "She sighed." They slow your dialogue down. If you feel need them, look at the words—the actual dialogue— your character used when he was yelping. Maybe it doesn't reflect the way someone would sound if he yelped. Maybe if you strengthen the dialogue, you can ditch the overblown tag.

3. When you can, reveal who is saying something by the voice or tone of the dialogue. That way you may be able to skip tags occasionally, especially when you have only two people speaking to one another. Your dialogue will ring truer, too.

4. Avoid having characters use other characters' names. In real life, we don't use people's names in our speech much. We tend to reserve using names for when we're angry or disapproving or we just met in a room full of people and we're practicing out social skills. Having a character direct her speech to one character or another by using her name is a lazy writer's way of directing dialogue and it will annoy the reader. When a reader is annoyed, she will not be immersed in the story you are trying to tell.

5. Avoid putting internal dialogue in italics. Trust your reader and your own ability to write in a character's point of view. She will know who is thinking the words from the point of view of the narrative.

6. Be cautious about using dialogue to tell something that should be shown. It doesn't help much to transfer telling from the narrator to the dialogue. It just makes the character who is speaking sound long winded. Putting quotation marks around exposition won't draw the reader into the scene or involve him more than if you'd left it part of the narrative.

7. And magic number seven is, don't break up dialogue sequences with long or overly frequent blocks of narrative. One of dialogue's greatest advantages is that it moves a story along. If a writer inserts too much stage direction, it will lose the forward motion and any tension it is building.

8. Avoid having every character answer a question directly. Some people do that (say a sensitive young girl who has been reared to obey her elders) but many don't. Some veer off with an answer that doesn't follow from the question asked. Some are silent. Some characters do any one of these things as a matter of course. Some do them purposefully, say to avoid fibbing or to change the subject or because they are passive aggressive.

9. Avoid dull dialogue that doesn't help draw better characters or move the action forward. Forcing a reader to hear people introduce themselves to one another without a very good reason to do so is cruel and unusual punishment.

10. Use dialogue to plant a seed of intrigue. If a character brings up a concern that isn't solved immediately, you can heighten the page-turning effect.

For more on writing dialogue check out Tom Chiarella's Writing Dialogue (Writers' Digest) and for more on editing in general—from editing query letters to turning unattractive adverbs into metaphoric gold—find The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success (Red Engine Press) on Amazon.

Carolyn Howard-Johnson is an instructor for the UCLA Extension Writer's Program. The first book in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books, The Frugal Book Promoter, won USA Book News' Best Professional Book Award and Book Publicists of Southern California's Irwin Award. The second, The Frugal Editor, is also a USA Book News winner. It includes many editing tips on dialogue, the use of quotation marks and more. Learn more at www.howtodoitfrugally.com.

by Joyce Shafer

An e-book can satisfy your desire to write, act as a business building tool, and provide true value to others in many ways. There are guidelines you should use to guarantee its quality.

Here are several key points you want to use to improve or guarantee value for readers. Consider them before you write or type the first word of your e-book or any other product you intend to sell to or share with readers. While you read these, notice how they apply to how you can market what you offer more effectively, as well.

You’ve decided on your topic. Who are your target readers and where can you find them? Don’t answer “everyone,” because you’ll reach no one with that approach. Who, specifically, is your e-book supposed to serve? You want to speak directly to them. This helps you stay true to your topic, create a title that let’s them know what to expect or gets them to at least consider what you offer, and helps you fine-tune marketing language so the right audience finds you.

What problem do they want to solve that you can assist them with? What about their life or experience will change because of the information you provide to them? What are the benefits they can expect from the content you include? Benefits can be the obvious ones, as well as what your information can help them avoid going forward.

Avoid the temptation to attempt to solve a lot of problems in one e-book. Focus on a core issue and directly-related impacts on readers’ lives; and give them a system to use that helps them move forward. Provide them with a system that is, as much as possible, easy and effortless, and repeatable. Use narrative to explain why the system works and how to use it, and offer examples of your own story and/or experiences that support your information.

Make value more important than length. If you can provide a genuine method to assist them, how long your e-book is won’t matter to your targeted audience, only that you fulfill your promise. If this were an e-book you sought, what would you expect to find in it and how would you hope the information would be presented? What would your ideal outcome be after you read it?

Include a summary chapter. Offer encouragement that supports their Why—why they sought your e-book in the first place, which was a commitment to move something about their life experience forward. Be sure to give them a way to connect with you whether it’s a designated email address, your Web site link, Blog site, or whatever way allows them to have a guarantee that if they need to ask you a question, they can easily reach you.

If you have other products, services, e-books, books, reports, audios, and so forth available, include the titles, formats, and links to where they can find them. Tell them something about yourself; but just enough. You can direct them to your formal bio on your Web site or wherever it’s posted.

Don’t be afraid to be authentic and original. You may follow the basic format used by someone who offers something similar to what you do, but do everything in your own words and with your own flair. Your authenticity (and your authentic commitment to assist them) will come through to readers, and this can create connection. Especially if they feel you get them and the impacts on their lives of the problem they wish to solve. Don’t try to “sound” a certain way, sound the way you are. Write in your voice.

Let your audience hear the real you, and let them know that you hear them.

Joyce Shafer, LEC and author of I Don’t Want to be Your Guru, but I Have Something to Say, and Write, Get Published, and Promote, helps novice writers of self-development e-books move through the self-publishing process: 6 weeks, 7 steps. http://lifecoacheswriteebooks.webs.com.  See reviews of all her books and e-books at Lulu’s online store.

by JJ Murphy

Book Review: Field Guide to Wildlife Habitats of the Eastern United States

“Imagine diving headfirst into the water from a height of 50 feet and, at the precise moment, intersecting a fish that is desperately trying to evade you. Imagine repeating this every twenty minutes from 4 a.m. to 11 p.m. Parent kingfishers are on this schedule for weeks at a time . . .”

Janine Benyus’s field guide, organized by habitat, is interwoven with essay-style descriptions that make identification of the plants, animals, geology and ecosystems easier to use than standard field guides.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading field guides this year. Some, like this book, are meant to be studied at home or in the classroom before heading out to explore a specific habitat. Knowing not only what a plant, fungus or animal looks like, but how it behaves increases your ability to correctly identify what you observe.

While field guides that feature comparisons of look-alikes provide important information, often plants, fungi and wildlife that look alike do not live in the same habitat.

Benyus provides easy-to-follow information on 38 distinct habitats without overloading the senses. You are much more likely to remember the information in her subheading “What’s in it for Wildlife,” with writing that shows, rather than tells what the wildlife is doing.

The book begins by showing readers how to use the guide and defining habitat. Benyus also offers tips on observing and getting closer to wildlife. Each chapter provides geological and ecological histories in Benyus’s essay style and a closer look at the lives of a representative mammal, bird and reptile or amphibian inhabitant.

Sidebar information includes a map and sampling list of locations where the habitat exists, a list of characteristic plants, a two-page illustration of the habitat and an interactive Wildlife Locator Chart that lets readers pinpoint the nesting and feeding sites of over 40 residents of each habitat.

This guide and its companion The Field Guide to Wildlife Habitats of the Western United States, belong on every teacher’s desk, in every public and home library, not just for the information, but for the pleasure of reading an engaging nature writer.

JJ Murphy is a freelance nature writer, photographer, blogging hiker, forager, locavore, and tree-hugger with more than 50 years of eco-centric living experience. Visit www.WriterByNature.com if you need relevant content that captures your personal style and tone.

by Heidi Thomas

“You just can’t get there from here.”

How many times have you heard that direction-giving joke? That line can describe a type of writer’s block. You’ve written up to a certain point. You know where you want to go up ahead. But what do you write in between? I have wasted hours, days, even weeks, trying to figure out what to write next, so I can get to that future scene I already have in my head.

But wait. Who says you have to write in a linear fashion? What if you write out of sequence? Aha! Now, you’ve given yourself permission to write the scene from your head and it flows wonderfully. Another Aha! Questions and solutions actually appear about how the character might have arrived here from there. You’re not stuck any more.

As a writing instructor once explained, to build a bridge, one first needs to erect a scaffold. It’s not a lot different in writing. You have several important scaffold scenes in your story or novel that have to take place:

•  The Introductory Scene where the reader meets your main character.

• A Meeting Scene, where the main character meets another character (maybe the love interest or maybe his nemesis).

• A Conflict Scene where two characters battle it out, physically, verbally, or in a match of wits. Or the character battles himself.

• A Realization Scene—the moment the character realizes something about herself that is a turning point. Or realizes her “enemy” is really her friend.

• A Resolution Scene, where a problem is resolved (not necessarily the main one, but a problem nonetheless).

• A Final Scene, which may not be your actual ending. An interesting exercise is to write a scene where your main character(s) are old and looking back at what happened, what they learned, how they’ve changed, what they would’ve done differently, etc. That can give you an insight to “fill in the blanks.”

Or write a letter from your main character to yourself, as if this person has just learned you are writing a book about her, how she feels, any advice she might have for you, etc. This can be quite revealing. Sometimes you learn that you have a reluctant character, one who doesn’t want her story told. So you have to figure out how to win her over.

Or The Writer magazine suggests:

1. Write a scene where the main character enters a new place..

2. Take a minor character and write a scene where he/she appears later in the story.

3. Choose a character other than the main character—someone you’d like to know more about, and write a monologue in which she explains herself.

4. Write a scene where your main character has a dream that advances the story.

These scenes may or may not appear in your final draft, but they will help you keep writing and develop ideas.

~~~~~
Raised on a ranch in isolated eastern Montana, Heidi Thomas has had a penchant for reading and writing since she was a child. Armed with a degree in journalism from the University of Montana, she worked for the Daily Missoulian newspaper, and has had numerous magazine articles published. Her grandmother, who rode steers in rodeos during the 1920s, spurred Heidi to write a novel based on that grandmother’s life. Cowgirl Dreams is the first in a series about strong, independent Montana women.  Heidi is a member of Women Writing the West, Skagit Valley Writers League, Skagit Women in Business, and the Northwest Independent Editors Guild. She is an avid reader of all kinds of books, enjoys hiking the Pacific Northwest, where she writes, edits, and teaches memoir and fiction writing classes. http://www.heidimthomas.com

End of Goodbye

He kissed the inside of my wrist; I touched his hair. Then we just walked away ‘cause we couldn’t go there.

He was getting married, and I was leaving town. His wedding date was set; I couldn’t hang around.

I had some guy friends before, but he was the best. We had always been closer than all of the rest.

There were no words, not even a smile. I took a step, it felt like a mile. There were no words; there could be no words. No more tears at the end of goodbye.

Ten little steps; and then I looked back. He was just standing there, watching me. Then I raised my hand; he shook his head. And this was the way it had to be.

There were no words, not even a smile. No more tears at the end of goodbye.

Jan Bossing © 2009, Joelton, TN

All This Carrying On
by Dennis S Martin

For just one minute I turn my back, and
Walk out of the room.
I come back to a huge disaster
Sounding like a sonic boom.
The whole room’s lost all its sanity
And no one knows just where it’s gone.
Time to put an end to this feuding and fighting,
And all this carrying on.

Three a.m. is a time for quiet,
A time for reflection and sleep.
Especially for a working man
Who has obligations to keep.
Then some damn fool tries to raise a ruckus
And party til the morning sun.
It’s clear somebody’s got to shut him down,
And all this carrying on.

You and me sometimes disagree,
We let common sense slide.
We say things that we both don’t mean,
Leaving reason aside.
But it’s okay at the end of the day.
It doesn’t matter who won.
We work it out when we finally stop
All this carrying on.

Dennis S Martin
Web site: www.iwritesome.com
Blog: www.iwritesome.blogspot.com
Storefront: www.lulu.com/dsmartin