Alexander M. Zoltai's Blog, page 170

Characters Who Make Writers Change Their Minds . . .

Welcome to the Special, Fridayseries of posts: Behind The Scenes of Notes from An Alien :-) Some of these posts have “spoilers” and the best way to guard against them intruding on your enjoyment of the book is to grab a free copy and take the short amount of time to read it (only about […]

Would You Like To Deeply Study English?

I receive Michael Quinion’s newsletter from World Wide Words—always something interesting or strange or wonderful :-) Here’s a recent example: Q: “From Bob Taxin, San Francisco — I was watching an Australian murder mystery on television where a teacher criticised her student’s grotesque theory of what might have happened to the victim by saying that […]

How Many Ways Can You Tell A Story?

Have you ever considered that there are many ways to tell a story? Some folks know about 3rd person and 1st person point-of-view. For example: “John walked down the path thinking about his sweetheart.”, is 3rd person. 1st person might be, “Man, I wish Sheila was here. She’s my missing half!” Not high literature but […]

What Kind of Reader Are YOU?

Some folks might think I post more about writers and publishers than about readers. There are 43 posts with the tag “reader” but, then, every writer and publisher is also a reader, eh? Now that that’s “settled”, I’d like to venture that there are no two people in the world who are exactly the same […]

Falling In Love With A Library

Ever had a crush on a library? I’d be quite surprised if any of my readers never even Liked a library… There are posts here with the tag Libraries (24 posts) and one of my favorites was Little Libraries Spreading All Over:-) “Fairly small, up on a pole, books inside, and saying, ‘Take A Book […]

Why Do Authors Do What They Do? ~ A Living Example . . .

Unless you’re a writer/author (and, you can be an author without publishing) you may not know about all the weird and wonderful decisions we make during the process of turning ourselves inside-out onto the page… This is a special Friday Behind The Scenes post about the short novel Notes from An Alien which is still […]

What Are Your Favorite Book (Reading) Lists?

I usually have questions for my readers at the end of a post but I’ll start with some today from a previous post, The Best Books? ~ Whose Opinion Do YouTrust? “I guess the point to be made is that your list isn’t my list—or—The New York Times might not be your best guide—or—carry a […]

Lies Writers Tell Themselves (And, Each Other…)

Actually, I was going to call this post Meet Some Successful Unpublished Authors. But… The list I’m going to recommend includes a few published authors… Still, I want to bring up something I said in the past post, Are You A Successful, UnpublishedAuthor?, because the Interviews you can read have a number of them. What […]

Top Ten Whats??

This past April I wrote the article called Top Ten Posts About Writing & Writers . .. Those were the Top Ten over the life of this blog—since January of 2011. I thought it might be interesting for readers to see a different Top Ten—links folks click on. I’ll only present the top links for […]

Are Readers Going To Be The New Gatekeepers?

I’ve written about gatekeepers a number of times here… In the post Are Readers The Winners In The New PublishingGame? I said: “Should more readers demand that authors forget about genre and write what the unique combination of theme, plot, and character demands of their creativity?” “Is it conceivable that the reading public could select […]