Rick Taubold's Blog, page 2

Indie publishing: Are you doing it wrong?—Part One

From Rick: In late 2007, with the advent of Kindle Direct Publishing, the self-publishing landscape forever changed. Many authors embraced this new publishing world and grew with it as it has changed over the years since. Some have been slow to adopt it, sticking with traditional publishing, and some of those in traditional publishing are […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Pronouns: tricky agreements and stumbling blocks—PART 2

From Rick: In Part 1 of this two-part series I discussed subject, object, and possessive (genitive) pronouns. You might want to check that out if you missed it. In that post I mentioned seeing sentences like the following: “I think it’s time that I told you about Rita and I’s relationship.” Recently I one of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Pronouns: tricky agreements and stumbling blocks—PART 1

From Rick: Last time I talked about nouns and the issues we might run into with them when it comes to figuring out verb agreements. Most of us won’t have a problem with the following sentence: The legal team at Smith, Jones, and Doe is your best choice for personal injury attorneys. But when we […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Nouns: tricky plurals and verb agreements

From Rick: In a recent post, I talked about some of the style changes in the latest edition (17th) of the Chicago Manual of Style: GRAMMAR AND STYLE TIPS-PART 1 In this post I’m going to talk about some problems with figuring out verb agreement with certain types of nouns and pronouns. I’m sure that […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Story structure models–PART 3

From Rick: Last year I did two posts on story structures and had thought them to be relatively complete. However, I was recently contacted regarding the first of those two posts. The person who contacted me praised the post and the blog and also provided a link to a blog post on story structures by […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Apostrophes & the English possessive: Things to make your head explode

From Rick: Followers of my blog know that I really try to mix things up, presenting articles on a wide variety of topics from how-to articles and posts on writing to publishing advice, interviews, and other things of interest to writers. This week I’m not going to pull any punches. This topic is embodied in […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Guest author, RLB Hartmann

From Rick: Years ago, the major publishers pretty much stopped publishing western novels because, like many of the nonsensical things they did, they assumed—for some inexplicable reason—that people didn’t want to read Westerns anymore. Some novel genres seemed to go in cycles. When I was just beginning serious writing, it became apparent that the big […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

How to use dashes properly in fiction

From Rick: I’m in a bit of a time crunch during the month of October with several projects to complete by the end of the month (or before). As a result, I’m going to post every other week in October (Oct. 13 and 27). For this week, I’m going to post a link to an […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

A balancing act: keeping the reader informed and interested-Part 2

From Rick: I’m going to do something a little different this time to demonstrate how one balances two important aspects of a story: informing the reader and maintaining reader interest. I did a previous post on this, but here I’m going into greater depth. A BALANCING ACT-PART 1 The problem arises because informing the reader […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

A balancing act: keeping the reader informed and interested

From Rick: I’m going to do something a little different this time to demonstrate how one balances two important aspects of a story: informing the reader and maintaining reader interest. The problem arises because informing the reader is usually exposition (and sometimes description) and that often is telling rather than showing. Even when information is […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...