L. Lane Bailey's Blog, page 12

Updating Books…

One advantage to ebooks is the ability to push no content to them. The issue I’ve been having is that as I have updated them… finding a typo or clarifying a paragraph… that update hasn’t been populating existing copies. I have been working the last few weeks (and probably another two weeks) to correct that.

Amazon doesn’t make it easy. Read More

I have to tell them the specific changes that have been made. So, for each change, I have to give them a “location number” (which I think might b...

Another At Arm’s Length excerpt

About a month ago I posted an excerpt from this work in progress. I set it aside for a while to work on “New Life” (I hate that title and it will change) getting the story to novel length and finishing the first draft. I have been back at it on AAL for a week or so and I like what I have so far. Here is a small taste.

Finch stood up from the couch and started to pull his weapon from the shoulder holster inside his jacket.  Before he could free the gun, Finn ripped his 1911 out of the hol...

Kicking Butt and Making Names

Names for characters are often a struggle. there are a few issues that come into play when naming a character.

First, the character might have an appropriate name. It might be symbolic or ironic. For example, a nerd might need to be named Egbert. Unless an ironic name would be better suited, like Romeo. And with dozens of characters, there has to be a balance.

After all, everyone can’t have a name that is too cool. My main characters in the Dixon-Prince series are Jonathon “Jack”...

FREE Book

Yep. It’s been available for a while. It was actually updated a few months back, too. I have a FREE ebook available for subscribers to the blog. You hit the subscription button to get email updates each week (every once in a while there is an additional special announcement, but those are rare) and the first email you get will point you to a FREE book. Read More

What’s IN this book, you ask? Well, I have part of it posted on Vocal for your perusal. Yep, that was the link for it ri...

Vella

If you were unaware, Amazon is rolling out a new reading product in the US called Vella. the idea behind it is episodic fiction… kind of like episodes of TV shows, but with writing. For older people, like the serial stories that some magazines used to have. Read More

It has been something I have been kicking around.

However, there is a wrinkle for us writers. It can’t be published elsewhere. So, for example, I couldn’t take one of my books and convert it or run it on Vella parallel...

Book Excerpts on Vocal

There are actually a bunch of my book excerpts I’ve posted over on Vocal. Some of them have been different than the ones I’ve posted here… and there have even been a couple of complete stories. All titles are linked to both Vocal (with vocal in the text) and the full book on Amazon (title of book). Read More

I offer an ebook called Escape for subscribing to my blog. You can get the whole thing free… or you can catch Escape on Vocal and read the first three chapters. You can click from o...

Autobiographical

Another type of story I seem to have a growing collection of on Vocal are autobiographical. Some of my fiction writing is based on episodes in my life, but those are highly fictionalized. However, I have written a few things that aren’t altered… or at least no more than my memory having altered them through the years. Read More

The first was for a challenge. The subject was confessions, and I have to admit that mine was pretty light… not the deep, dark secret for which they were looking....

September Goals

I have three goals for September. For many, they would be modest, but They would each be momentous for me. And, if they can be accomplished, each would help create more stability in the writing portion of my life… And I have a lot more planned. Read More

First, the blog.

I used to have a few hundred readers a week. But, in February, FB changed their algorithm, and engagement from there fell off a cliff. In two weeks it fell to 5% of what it had been before. Oddly, I started getti...

Hammond Family collection

For the Vocal Summer Fiction Series, I did one set of entries (9 stories for 8 challenges) that are all connected. Each story stands on it’s own, but they have a common thread running through them. That wasn’t a challenge requirement, but something I did for fun. The common thread is that the stories all revolve around one family and their lives in southern Ohio, the fictional Hammond family.

The first story is The Magic. It sets the stage and introduces the farm and barn. This was the...

Summer Fiction Series entries

On Vocal.media, there was an eight week challenge that involved a new prompt each week. I did two groups of challenge entries. One, the Hammond Family saga, will be profiled on Wednesday. This is the other. Each of these are stand alone stories to meet the prompts. They are each very different from the others.

For the first challenge, the barn, I wrote a story called Holy Grail about a car found in a barn. I have to admit that the story is similar to the barn find in Planning Vengeanc...