Michael E. Henderson's Blog: Henderson's The Literary Man, page 9

Five Simple Steps to Improve Your Writing

There are a handful of very simple things you can do to improve your writing. I’ll venture to say that all novice writers who have not been trained as writers make these mistakes. I suggest you experiment. Save a working copy of your manuscript, then go through and make the changes I suggest here. See if it isn’t better. You may have difficulty at first, because you write the way you talk. But don’t do it. Yeah, in dialogue you sometimes have a tag for a character, such as he says “you” inste...

Simple Steps to Improve Your Writing

There are a handful of very simple things you can do to improve your writing. I’ll venture to say that all novice writers who have not been trained as writers make these mistakes. I suggest you experiment. Save a working copy of your manuscript, then go through and make the changes I suggest here. See if it isn’t better. You may have difficulty at first, because you write the way you talk. But don’t do it. Yeah, in dialogue you sometimes have a tag for a character, such as he says “you” inste...

Book Review: The Woman in the Fifth, by Douglas Kennedy

“The fifth” refers to a section of Paris, which is divided into arrondissement. The woman to which the title refers lives in the fifth arrondissement. When I saw the cover I thought it was chick lit. There’s a woman looking all sexy, the title in fancy script in a girly color, and a title that sounds like chick lit. On the back cover were a bunch of other covers of this author’s titles that also looked like chick lit. I bought it because 1) it was a euro at the used book store, and 2) wh...

Kindle Paperwhite Browser Issue

Here's an update on my Kindle Paperwhite. I still love it, but I had a problem with the browser. The browser is almost useless, but it does have some functionality, and should work. I could not find a fix on the internet or on the Amazon site, and Amazon "customer service" is totally unresponsive. I thought maybe I had to reset it, but I dreaded that, so I fooled with it until I figured it out.

When I tried to load a website (this one, actually) the Web and Google portions of the browser locke...

Book Review: The Woman in the Fifth, by Douglas Kennedy

“The fifth” refers to a section of Paris, which is divided into arrondissement. The woman to which the title refers lives in the fifth arrondissement. When I saw the cover I thought it was chick lit. There’s a woman looking all sexy, the title in fancy script in a girly color, and a title that sounds like chick lit. On the back cover were a bunch of other covers of this author’s titles that also looked like chick lit. I bought it because 1) it was a euro at the used book store, and 2) whe...

Review of Kindle Paperwhite

About four years ago my wife bought a Kindle. I didn’t like it. The screen was too small and the contrast was poor. Although I’m old school and like a book, I saw the benefit to having one. But I couldn’t bring myself to spring for it. That has all changed. The Kindle Paperwhite has made having one worth it.

By the way, this is not meant to be a technical analysis or a tutorial on how to work it, there’s plenty of that out there. This is just may take on what it’s like.

The display is black...

My Author Website

Every author with a book for sale should have a website. Since my novel A Beast in Venice (working title) is scheduled to come out in September, I thought it a good time to start getting one ready. There are many sites where you can build a very nice website. None of them are perfect, but after trying several, I chose Squrespace. Here’s why:

Free trial. Although they do not have a free version, they let you try it for free for two weeks without actually buying it and hoping for a refund. And t...

Best (inexpensive) Word Processor for Writers

Most writers don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on a word processing program, and they don’t need to. There are many free or very inexpensive programs that do everything a writer needs, without all the bells and whistles of Word or WordPerfect. I used WordPerfect for years, and I still consider it vastly superior to Word, and I wish I could use it. But they sell it for about $250. So I started to look around for a good word processor that was free or very inexpensive. The one I found is...

Book Review: The Misremembered Man, by Christina McKenna

If you want to know how to write a novel, read this book and pay attention. There are moments of brilliant writing, and the story itself is a well-crafted and tightly woven work masterfully done.

The story takes place in Ireland, and revolves around Jamie McCloone, a farmer who had been raised in an orphanage until the age of ten, and Lydia Devine, a school teacher who, even at forty-one, is subject to her demanding mother.

In the orphanage Jamie was abused and tortured by the nuns. The ch...

Book Review: The Shining, by Stephen King

Although I wrote a novel that I call literary with elements of horror, I have never read a horror novel. So, I thought it high time. They say you should read in the genre in which you write, and it has been suggested to me that my novel, although horror by definition, had an issue with respect to the timing of the horror. I needed to find out how the master did it.

This book was first published in 1977, and made into a movie by Stanley Kubrik in 1980. The movie follows the plot pretty wel...