Riley Adams's Blog, page 230

Quiet Books

We hear a lot of advice these days on hooking our readers and grabbing them on page one.  That's easy enough—if we've written something fast-paced, like a thriller.

But what if we've written a quiet book?  Hope you'll pop over to Michele Emrath's Southern City Mysteries blog for some thoughts on hooking a reader in a slower-paced book. 

Twitterific

Here are writing links that I've posted to Twitter for the past week. If you're looking for a particular topic, just plug in your keyword into the search box at the top left-hand corner of the blog (on the black header right above my blog name…next to the Blogger symbol…the small search window is next to the magnifying glass) and the roundup with your subject will come up. To narrow your search down on the page, do a CTRL+F, type your subject, and hit enter.

Do the things you *think* you...

Planning a Book Tour

Book tours can get expensive and overwhelming, but they don't have to be.  And a tour doesn't mean you have to cover a broad area of the country, either.  You can limit it to just a few towns that are close to each other, geographically.

The nice things about book tours is that you get an opportunity to produce a spike in book sales, develop a relationship with some book retailers, and create a little buzz about your book.

I'm going on a book tour starting this next Friday in central...

Making a Living With Art?

Sometimes it's easy to get dragged into your day…and the day isn't a very inspiring one.

That was my day on Wednesday. I had what felt like an army of workmen at my house, in and out, lugging materials around for the air and heat system. They kept me in the loop as far as what they were doing (although I didn't understand a word of it.) And my daughter was dying to get out of the house (probably because we couldn't get out of the house.)

The salesman who sold us the system, which cost ...

Mental Preparation—Or, Expecting the Worst

Right now, even as I type, we're having our upstairs and downstairs a/c systems replaced, along with our furnace.

In my blissful ignorance, I thought this wasn't that complex of a job. Actually, I don't think I thought anything much about it at all. I was a little surprised when I heard that it was going to take Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to do the job…but I didn't really think about the why behind the length of the job.

Then, a few days ago, I spoke to a friend of mine and...

Inspiration from Unusual Places

I'd reached one of those points in my current manuscript where I really wasn't excited about moving forward with the plot. I wasn't even really sure how I was going to move the plot forward. In fact…I'd stalled out.

I skipped ahead to a different part of the book…which works out great. You still get work done on the manuscript, but you're not working on the part that's tripping you up.

But I needed to get back to the rocky part of my story.

I'm one of those writers who works completely

Google Reader

I've gotten a few comments in the last couple of months, asking about Google Reader and how we can make it work for us. I thought I'd do a real quick overview of the way I use the application in case it might help someone else.

I subscribe, admittedly, to an obscene number of blogs (See below. Looks like I'm up to 1380, although I could have sworn I was around 1,000.)

What is Google Reader? It's sort of a newspaper with all the blogs you've chosen as favorites included in the paper. ...

Creating Lifelike Characters

I know that it seems like I spend way too much time at the swimming pool. It's just been such an incredibly hot summer (even for the Deep South), that whenever my children utter the fateful words, "We're bored!" then I just pop them in the car and take them off to the pool.

I was at the pool last week and something started bothering me about the tree in the picture. See the tree I'm talking about? It's huge. It's like a pine tree on steroids.

The other thing that bothered me about t...

Twitterific

Here are writing links that I've posted to Twitter for the past week. If you're looking for a particular topic, just plug in your keyword into the search box at the top left-hand corner of the blog (on the black header right above my blog name…next to the Blogger symbol…the small search window is next to the magnifying glass) and the roundup with your subject will come up. To narrow your search down on the page, do a CTRL+F, type your subject, and hit enter.

Character Relatability:

Small Town Settings

Happy Saturday, everyone!

This morning I'm over at mystery reader Babs Hightower's blog, writing a little about pros and cons to writing small town settings…that are based on real towns.   Hope you'll come by for a visit. :)