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  • If you’re enjoying Aaron’s guest posts, check out his Workshop Wednesdays on his blog, Forging Fiction. You can submit or just observe. He will put submitted pages up anonymously, give a few pieces of constructive criticism, and encourage his followers to do so as well. What you get is unfiltered constructive feedback (closely monitored by…

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  • POV

    I’ve been ruminating for awhile and am about ready to start a new novel. Every time between books, I panic, certain I will never have another idea and every time, something happens (or doesn’t) and it comes to me. Books arrive. I don’t know exactly how to explain it if it hasn’t happened to you.…

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  • Bad me. I’ve neglected to direct you to Aaron’s wonderful short story, An Affair To Forget. Only 99¢ in the Amazon Kindle Store! Now on to the 3rd Rule in his guest post this week: By adgansky 3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. –Kurt Vonnegut It…

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  • Two disparate events this week – we put up Lee Stoops‘ annotation of Volt, Alan Heathcock‘s short story collection, on Annotation Nation. Then, Wild, the memoir by my friend and mentor Cheryl Strayed was chose by Oprah to relaunch her book club into Oprah 2.0. Wow. I feel remarkably luck to have had Cheryl as…

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  • Hello from New Orleans and thanks to Aaron Gansky for this week’s guest post. Enjoy and let the good times roll! (note: I added the image for fun) By adgansky 2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. –Kurt Vonnegut I’m going to go ahead and say it. This…

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  • Over the next couple of months, Aaron D. Gansky will be making appearances as my first guest blogger. Aaron is a novelist, teacher, and editor of The Citron Review, an online literary journal. In 2009, he earned his M.F.A in Fiction at the prestigious Antioch University of Los Angeles. His short eBook An Affair to…

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  • New tool for writing! But only for revisions – it would be a disaster in a first draft. In his book The Secret Life of Pronouns, James W. Pennebaker examines everything from Craigslist to the Federalist Papers. The books’ description says he uses “computational linguistics-in essence, counting the frequency of words we use-to show that…

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  • Portrait of a Bookstore

    One of my favorite places – and most meaningful – is closing. Portrait of a Bookstore is the first place I gave a reading for my first novel, DEAD WEIGHT. They said at the time that it was one of their most successful events 😉 I love Portrait of a Bookstore – loved it before…

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  • Gratitude

    The other night, I read a ten minute version of my life at a reunion meeting for a retreat I did in February. As I reflected on growing up, I realized I have a deep sense of gratitude of all those writers who allowed me to escape into the worlds they created. There are many…

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  • EBOOK SPECIAL

    Until May 27, I am pricing all 3 ebooks at 99¢ each! Go Like my Facebook Author page and get the coupons for Smashwords. Amazon should list them at that price by tomorrow. Please spread the word! Thanks so much

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