Phillip T. Stephens's Blog: Wind Eggs, page 23
December 20, 2016
Smorgasbord Christmas Party – Guest Phillip T. Stephens with A Christmas Carol: The Sequel
Sally Cronin was kind enough to pass on my experience with a surprise visitor last Christmas Eve. I hope you enjoy it.
Smorgasbord - Variety is the spice of life
My guest, Phillip T. Stephens, was also here earlier in the party with a very informative and important message about adopting a kitten at this time of year.
He is now back with a short story……
A Christmas Carol: The Sequel by Phillip T. Stephens
The money came pouring in last year. We weren’t rich, but for the first time in three years both my wife and I worked all twelve months, she got a raise and I made twice what I made the previous four years put together.
Let me put it this way: we gave the nineteen-inch TV and our old blu-ray to my son, bought a 4k 3D blu-ray player, a 65-inch HDTV, a stereo surround sound system, another HDTV for the bedroom, and an iMac. Even an X-Box with enough games to keep Bryan in his room for most of the summer. A new microwave, some furniture….
You…
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If You Give A Writer…
Is this funny? It’s like the glass half-filled with water. If you enjoy it, you’ll share. If you don’t see the humor, you can tweet about it like Trump.
I have no idea what made me think of this, but I had a lot of fun with it and I hope you enjoy it. It’s based off the children’s book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff.
If you give a writer a pen, she’ll want a notebook to go with it.
If you give her a notebook, she’ll fill it up and complain her hand hurts.
If her hand hurts, she’ll ask for a computer.
If she asks for a computer, you’ll have to go to the store to buy one.
If you go to the store, she’ll spend hours picking one out.
When she finally decides, she’ll want to start using it right away.
If she wants to use it right away, you’ll have to set it up.
When you finally set it up, it’ll be nighttime.
If it’s nighttime, she’ll ask for coffee to…
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December 19, 2016
9 free Christmas gifts for your blog and your readers!
I bookmarked this post even though I’ve already done many of these. Check it out and see if your blog can benefit too.
Another year of blogging is almost over and while we are all caught up with the Christmas spirit, why not give a few useful gifts to your blog this year? These are all things that frustrate me (I have posted about them before) and other bloggers.
Add contact details:
Whether you put an email address in the sidebar, use the forwarding email that is available with a WordPress blog or use a contact form that can be put in with one click (in the ‘old’ editor at least) by pressing the Add Contact Form... Please make sure you can be contacted by other bloggers who might want to invite you for a guest post, literary agents, Hollywood or the committee of the Booker Prize.
Link your blog to your Twitter account:
Few things are more frustrating than tweeting a post only to find that it comes…
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Guest Post: The 10 Best tools for Bloggers and Freelance writers
If you’re looking for some reasonably inexpensive (under $80) writing tools, I’ve worked with most if these and agree they can really fill in when you need them.
This is a guest post by
Benjamin Chiang, an enthusiast of good advertising, deep thinking, labor issues, and chocolate. As a writer, his work has appeared on www.fivestarsandamoon.com, Yahoo, Vulcanpost.com among others. You can find him at www.rangosteen.com or follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/brchiang
The 10 Best tools for Bloggers and Freelance writers
If you are a blogger or a freelance writer churning material for an income, you will likely face a basket load of productivity problems. These include:
Day-to-day journaling
Writing productivity
Organizing research
Graphic making
Collaboration
Here are some tools, both free and paid, that will help you meet your deadline!
Day-to-Day Journaling
In the old days, Hemmingway wrote on Moleskins and lugged them all around in heavy trunks (albeit heavy Louis Vuitton trunks). Though romantic to write in, you may find difficulty running a keyword search on notebooks. That’s why most of us…
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December 18, 2016
Smorgasbord Weekly Round Up -Great books, music and food for Christmas
For those of you looking for last minute Christmas ideas, Sally has a few. Don’t forget my own Christmas books Seeing Jesus http://t.co/sfl2KWor5j and The Worst Noel http://amzn.to/239NCNF (I have to piug my books too)
Smorgasbord - Variety is the spice of life
Welcome to the Weekly round up and essentially a review of the Christmas Party so far. I cannot thank the contributors to the series more.. they have pulled out all the stops to provide stories and poems that shine a light on the festive season from the joy of family to the destructive elements of loneliness and selfishness. There were some stories that resulted in tears and some in laughter but all were written by superb authors who celebrate life in all its glory (or in some cases gory)!
We are in the process of planning our own festivities and I cannot believe that it is only a week to Christmas Day.. We will be entertaining and I am cooking which is lovely… just hope it is for the guests. Then a week to relax a little (and finish off the turkey, chocolates and booze) before seeing in 2017.
We…
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December 16, 2016
EDITING 101: 16 – Homonyms, Homographs, and Homophones…
The distinction between homonyms, homographs and homophones may seem as trivial now as when you slept through high school English. (I loved most of high school Englishbut even I slept through this one.) When you’re getting ready to publish, however, not paying attention can make you look bad to critical readers. And they’re out there. I’ve had more than one e-mail pointing out stupid proofreading errors. Don’t let those emails end up in reviews,.
Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog
Originally posted as the Dun Writin’—Now Whut? series on this blog, EDITING 101 is a weekly refresher series for some of you and brand new for others.
Courtesy of Adirondack Editing
Homonyms, Homographs, and Homophones
I had a lot of fun researching today’s post. (Yes, I’m an über-geek, but let’s just keep this to ourselves, shall we?) You may be wondering what these words are (and how in the world they pertain to writing), but you’ll be surprised once I define them. I’m sure you know exactly what they are; you just don’t know the official words for them. And we’re only interested in one when it comes to writing and editing.
Homonyms are words with the same spelling and the same pronunciation, but they have different meanings:
bear (animal) and bear (tolerate)
rose (flower) and rose (past tense of “rise”)
spruce up a room and a spruce tree
See? You knew…
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A challenge to all Readers …
I’ve said many times in this blog: If you want to learn how to write, you need to read widely and in depth. That includes writers you’ve never read and genres you don’t usually follow. If I haven’t inspired you, maybe Susan will:
Books: Publishing, Reading, Writing
Earlier in the summer, I wrote and posted this to my blog: Why not read books simply because they’re well-written?
Then I asked Chris Graham, aka The Story Reading Ape, to create three memes that promoted three of the ideas I’d covered in this post: Ask for a meme …
For the purpose of this challenge, I want to focus on the suggestion in one of these memes …
Why not, indeed?
I recently began following two Facebook pages that were set up for the benefit of Readers. The gist of both sites was an exchange of reading recommendations and a place where readers could find out what they might want to read next. On the one site, there were a lot of rules posted restricting Indie Authors as to how much they could self-promote. Understandably so. However, authors were also restricted from posting links to our own blogs, and…
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December 15, 2016
The Crazy Cat Stuff People Have Shared
Two of these items are simply weird, but there may be a special place in cat hell for the person who came up with item number one, or so says Jenny Manytoes, my polydactl siamese who monitors the web,
The Reluctant Cat Owner's Journal
For some reason, my friends have this notion that I like cats. Because of this, they share with me a myriad of videos, pictures, and/or memes they fish from the Internet sludge (bless their hearts). Because it seems that my readers enjoy cats, I figure ‘If I have to be inundated with bizarre cat shit, so do you.’
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How do you become an editor?
Want to become an editor? I found it a thankless job, with authors constanly arguing with me for wounding their precious babies. But if you insist, here are some tips from Roz Morris.
Rachel Anderson asks: How did you get into editing? Did you start writing first and then take on editing as a natural second, or was it out of necessity since there are more opportunities for editors than writers?
Oof, talk about cutting to the quick. It’s certainly tricky to make a living as a full-time writer. So most writers also use their wordsmithing in some other way – teaching or working in the publishing trade.
But does that mean all writers could be editors? Not necessarily. There’s a lot of difference between tidying your own work and shaping someone else’s to professional standards.
And you need different skills for the various strains of editing.
Copy editing and proof reading These are the nitpicky, forensic phases. Fact-checking and querying. Reading for consistency, clarity, correctness, house style, possible libel. The copy editor and proof reader are a human error trap –…
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First drafts #amwriting
I always told my students, “Just start writing. You can’t fix what isn’t there.”
“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shovelling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”
~Shannon Hale
Wind Eggs
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