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The marketing brainstorming has led to a bunch of insights, some of which relate to “If you build it to be less of a pain in the ass, then you will do it more often.”  So I’m going to be dinking around with the blogs for a bit, so if you see all kinds of […]

(This post was written by De Kenyon, who’s my middle-grade kids’ book persona/pseudonym.  You can find more about De Kenyon books at www.DeKenyon.com.) Holidays can be a very stressful time for kids.  Yes, there’s Christmas with its promises of presents, but there’s always this threat hanging above your head:  be good or Santa will throw

Sorry, this should really be a touching post in which I confess some sort of horrible flaw, redeem myself, and cause you to have empathy with…well, with whatever I decide you need to have empathy with today.  Writing is all about manipulation, after all, even when you use honesty to do it. But instead I’m

My publisher brain put itself on hold recently:  I’m still writing my ass off, but there is no urge whatsoever to put it up.  Granted, I’m working on a couple of novels right now, but believe me, I have plenty of back material that still needs to go up.  So what’s going on? It turns

Will post further details as I get ’em.  It’s supposed to be up in the next issue.   Woot!

Several editing observations have come up over the last week.  I’m not sure they’re going to do anybody else any good, but at the very least it’ll help me process.  This is coming out kind of rough and mean, I think at least partially because I’m trying to beat myself into submission,  and if nothing

I’m a writer, so here it is:  My Aunt Margie passed away on Monday, of probably a massive stroke.  Dad called to tell me.  This is Dad:  he always starts out the phone calls, and then Mom takes over.  I think it’s because there’s only so much time he can stand to be social, and

I love old ghost stories.   Mostly late 19th-century British ones.  There are some good American ones, Canadian ones…but mostly British ones.  They’re short, maybe five thousand  words at most, and are not inhabited by ghosts so much as they are by something else.  Yeah, there are ghosts, but not even half the time.  There

Not much has changed here – the layout and fonts are all.  Okay, that sounds like a lot.  But really it wasn’t. Under the basement…down in the dark… Elly always gets stuck with entertaining her relatives while their parents talk to her mom.  Blah, blah, blah.  It goes on for hours.  But this time, she

I think I’m going to just have to add walking (most) clients through their royalty calculators to my interior print layout services. Because what happens is I ask them, “How many pages do you want the interior to be, approximately?” and they say, “Oh, whatever looks good.” This is a bad, bad idea. Okay.  Let’s