Jeff Haws's Blog, page 2

My Next Short Story: No Outlet

Or, at least, I anticipate it being a short story. And I should probably put “short” in quotations because I could easily see it pushing 40K+ words, which isn’t all that short. But I digress …

Whatever it turns out to be length-wise, I have started writing it. It’s going to be a sort of psychological thriller/horror story about four sixth-grade neighbors who decide to take on the Legend of the Witch House in their quiet suburban neighborhood. I think most kids (well, at least, most kids who...

How to Write a Beta Reader Checklist

Last weekend, I patted my next novel “Separation” on the butt and sent it out into a little slice of the world, letting my beta readers explore the town of Alessandra and its various characters. Hopefully, they’ll enjoy the read, and won’t ultimately tell me to toss my computer in a fire and start over from the beginning.

Short of that, I feel like it’s important that my beta readers have some direction when they start diving into my story. I don’t want to simply hand the story to them and h...

How do you find beta readers? (Hint: Not on Goodreads)

I’ve talked on here about beta readers before, but the topic is rattling around my head again — and not only because my next novel should head off to that stage by this weekend. Last week, I ran across this article on SelfPublishingAdvice.org by author Michael La Ronn. It’s titled “Writing: How to Find Beta Readers,” but it’s really all about how to find beta readers on Goodreads.

Now, I’ve also talked about Goodreads before, along with my somewhat love-hate relationship with it, though I’ve...

Achieving Work-Life-Work Balance

Any of you who have a project on the side of your regular 9-to-5 job can relate to the problem — how do you balance your pay-the-bills job with a satisfying life outside of work, all while also scratching the itch that is the other work you’re passionate about. That challenge can get even deeper if you have a spouse who deserves more of your time than just a passing “Hi, honey” as you head to your home office or workshop or garage or dank lair to dive into your side project after coming home...

How to Hook the Reader from the Start

During a recent Facebook discussion about my new book, “The Slingshot” (available now on Amazon), an awesome fellow writer named Aurora Gregory said, “I swear, opening sentences are your super power…seriously…what a start!” It’s nice to know I have a super power, though I’m not sure Opening Sentence Man (“Leaping comma splices in a single bound!”) is gonna get invited into The Avengers any time soon.

But yeah, it’s something I put a lot of thought into. Often, when I go into a story, I have...

RWISA Blog Hop Tour

Today begins an exciting virtual journey with an organization I’m a member of called RWISA, a division of RAVE REVIEWS BOOK CLUB. There are going to be 19 blogs over the course of six days, which seems like a lot. Should be a chance to highlight some quality authors.

For my day of the tour, I’m handing my blog over to Harmony Kent. She’s a really talented author who’s written a bunch of books, and she’s got some interesting perspective on how she’s gotten this far. Below, you’ll see a Q&A fr...

How to Juggle Lots of Characters

One of the biggest differences between my first novel, Killing the Immortals, and this novel draft I’m almost done with, possibly called Separation, (but who the hell knows right now?) is the number of characters. Killing the Immortals was a lean, sleek bit of writing … very much by design. Considering it was the first novel I’d ever written, and pretty much the first fiction I’d ever really written, I didn’t want to get too complicated with it. It was relatively short, with few quoted chara...

Why I Write Every Day (And Why It Matters)

I have a confession to make … for much of the time I was writing my next novel, I was a bad writer. That’s not to say not to say I was writing a bad story (though I haven’t read the thing, so I wouldn’t put it past me), but that I was doing a bad job at the physical act of writing.

I started this book in mid September which, in retrospect, wasn’t the smartest decision I’ve made. I just hadn’t written anything in a few months, because I’d been in editing mode, and I was anxious to get going. B...

Books & Brews: Speaking at Reformation Brewery

If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter (or if you actually, ya know, know me), you know that one of my passions in life is trying new beers. Delving into local brews is one of my favorite ways to get to know any city I get the chance to visit in this country, and I enjoy supporting the local breweries around Atlanta. I know a lot of the brewers, and I really appreciate the community aspect of how breweries tend to become neighborhood gathering spots with fiercely local mindsets. Oh, and the...

Behold, as I Insult the Written Word

Making the rounds of the indie publishing world lately has been this HuffPo piece from Laurie Gough about the scourge that is self-published books, and how those books are “an insult to the written word.” It’s, shall we say, harsh toward indie authors. It’s also typical HuffPo click bait. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all wrong.

In fact, I wrote a post that was of a similar vein last spring (but that, I suspect, received a slight bit less attention), titled “Are Self-Published Books...