Alexander M. Zoltai's Blog, page 175

Fictional Geography ~ Alien Worlds

This post is part of the Friday series: Behind The Scenes of the story Notes from An Alien. If you want to avoid having “spoilers” intrude on your enjoyment of the book, just grab a free copy and read it before you dive deeply into this series of posts—the book is short… and, deep… You […]

Are You A Writer? Do You Use Twitter? Is There A Better Use of Your Time?

“Simple” post today… First a “confession”—I tried Twitter three times, each attempt spurred by a “revelation” about its usefulness… It may be valuable for others but not for me, though I still question the “value” others find in it… I can sum-up my doubt by saying that a hundred fans that truly care is worth […]

Education For Writers ~ Did Your Teachers Help You Learn?

A writer begins to learn the moment they’re born. First mom and dad are the teachers—maybe siblings and friends—then, the grades of school… In an essay I published 15 years ago, about my own education, I wrote: “As I sit here…surveying the territories my learning and education have each secured, I see the utter dependence […]

“The Great Book Robbery” ~ “a case of cultural theft or preservation?”

What if you were happy in your life, educated and productive, and another country decided you didn’t deserve to live where you do? What makes certain people think that other people aren’t as important as they are? And, why do some people commit horrific acts against other humans? I would love some of your answers […]

Poetry and Painting on Google Plus :-)

You can check out my thoughts and feelings on social media on this blog. As it stands now, I’m only utilizing Google Plus, though I do consider blogging a form of “social media” :-) I met a woman on G+ named Lena Levin—eagerly look forward to her posts and the Luscious images of her paintings… […]

Forests As Symbols In A Novel

This Special Behind The Scenes post finishes a series devoted to the request of Jane Watson for my views on various symbols in Notes from An Alien

Visual Thesaurus ~ More Than Fancy Diagrams

I’ve talked about the Visual Thesaurus before in this blog and even recommended you pay $20/year to unlock all its features; but, you can still get a lot of value even if you can’t afford the subscription. If you’ve never seen the results of using this tool, here’s the image for the word “blog” And, [...]

Fifteen Years Ago ~ A Poetic Expedition

The About Page is, usually, the second most visited place on any blog—people want to know who’s behind the words… Today I want to reveal some of my writing from fifteen years ago—major revelation of who I am… All the poems in this revelation are also in my book, Is Your Soul In Here

It’s About The Kids ~ Especially In Our Tortured World . . .

My short novel, Notes from An Alien, which is still free even though it’s for sale, is a story told from the perspective of folks 12 light-years from Earth. Still, it’s message is clearly for an Earth with multiple, interwoven crises… We on Earth have a massive about of work to heal our planet—much of [...]

FastPencil ~ Funny Name, Dynamite Publishing-Aid Company

This is the 18th post I’ve written about FastPencil on this blog—“FastPencil is Software in the Cloud – so you don’t have to download anything to your computer. It’s the fastest and easiest way to write, publish and sell books and ebooks—anywhere!“ In one past post, I summarized the FastPencil experience this way: *Write a [...]