E.L. Farris's Blog, page 5

Writing Tips: How A Pantseur Wrote an Outline

  I am a confirmed pantseur, or a writer who disdains imposition of rules, order or God save us all, outlines on my fly-by-the seat of my pants style. Damnit, I’m a pantseur and I won’t change for anyone. F*** rules! And f*** outlining! Gah! Yeah. That’s how my inner child, now a childish but still charming adult, thinks about the writing process. I wrote my first two novels without even the tiniest thread of an outline written on paper.  [...]

Monetize Your Website with PayPal Buttons

How do you add a PayPal button to your WordPress Blog? I first came across this question a few months ago, and it bedeviled me. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to add any arbitrary text, whether it was a pretty Amazon link or a PayPal link, to my blog. What was the problem? My WordPress blog was not self-hosted, and I couldn’t add PayPal or any links to other websites to my sidebar area as [...]

Writer Tips: Skipping Boring Scenes

As a self-published author, or author-to-be, how do you handle the mundane and the everyday aspects of your characters’ lives? When I was crafting my first novel, I hurried the pace of the action by stripping scenes to their most dramatic words and actions. Usually, I skipped right over the boring, day-to-day dialogue. As my critique partner Renée A. Schuls-Jacobson once explained, “Your characters don’t need to carry on goodbye parties at the end of each scene.” I laughed when she [...]

Self-Publishing and How to Become Amazon Bestseller

Do you want to be able to honestly say you’re a best-selling author? Whoa, you perked up didn’t you? Grinning. I’d be happy to share what I’ve learned, so please grab your coffee cup. One of the secrets to landing on the Amazon bestseller list is to place your book in the correct category. As a newbie self-published author, I am learning as I go, and I like sharing my lessons learned. This week, I experimented with trying a few [...]

Should You Use CreateSpace or Lightning Source for Printing?

Should you use CreateSpace or Lightning Source to print your self-published books? The short answer for me is both. In the case of other writers, the answer depends on whether you want to break into bookstores and libraries.  If you do, then your only viable choice is to publish your book through Lightning Source (LS), but you can also use CreateSpace (CS) for Amazon and direct sales only. If you don’t want to crack into bookstores or libraries, then the [...]

How to Make Money in Self-Publishing

I have spent a great deal of time researching the issue that haunts most Indie publishers: how do you make money at self-publishing? and have come to a few conclusions. I don’t like all of these conclusions, but we all need to understand the landscape we’re working in before we decide what path to take. Here’s what I’ve learned. Quantity is to self-publishing what location is to real estate. The more books self-published authors have for sale, the better. Period. [...]

Life of an Indie Author

I’m of mixed minds on this whole Indie thing. Right now, Ripple: YAV ranks: #718 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store) #6 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Family Life And this is great, I guess. I am so grateful people are reading my books. But I’m ready to go traditional. I sort of love the hustle and excitement of marketing two books while writing two other books, [...]

I Run Excerpt: Me and Little Sally

I Run is heading back to my editor for a bit more tweaking. I have been working really hard on drawing richer characterizations of the supporting characters. Unlike Ripple, I Run is written from a first person perspective. The main character is Sally Lane Brookman. What follows is an  introduction to her sidekick, Little Sally, or her inner child. I dream of Little Sally a lot. Most of the time, she’s running free and young again on the green fields [...]

Catie Rhodes: Forever Road

Morning friends! Please come hang out this morning with me and Catie Rhodes.

[image error]Grab your coffee or your tea and bring a question or two, and I promise we won’t bore you! Catie and I talk, a lot, and she’s one of those people who I always wanna talk to more once I type, “talk to you later.” She’s interesting and brilliant and full of humanity, of realness, of salt of the earth trueness–just like the characters in Forever Road.

Who is Catie? Let me borrow from her About Section, because it’s brilliant:

Catie Rhodes decided to turn her love of lying into writing fiction after she got fired for telling her boss the President was on the phone. It didn’t take Catie long to figure out what she wanted to do when she grew up. Drawing on her East Texas roots, her love of true crime, and her love of the paranormal, she writes the kind of stories she wishes the book stores sold. With her faithful Pomeranian, Cosmo, at her side, Catie relishes being that kid your mother warned you about, the one who cusses and never washes her hands after petting the dog.

I read a lot of books as part of my job. And yet you rarely see reviews here, and you know why that is? Because I’m really picky. So the review that follows, in which I tell you how much I love Catie’s debut novel, Forever Road, is a harbinger of just how good of a book it is. Trade in your latte money for just a day and grab a copy. I promise you won’t regret it.[image error]

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Forever Road by Catie Rhodes isn’t merely an excellent debut novel. It’s an excellent novel, period. Rarely do I appreciate both great characterization and tightly-wound plotting, but in this paranormal mystery, I enjoyed tiptoeing among carefully-laid clues while standing beside some very believable and likable characters.

The main character, Peri, is a scrappy, ghost-seeing misfit who does odd jobs in a small town in East Texas. Peri lives with the woman who basically raised her–Memaw, an aging, wise and gracious woman with some secrets of her own. In the opening scene of Forever Road, Peri makes a bargain with a soon-to-be dead woman, her cousin Rae: if Rae will stop screaming at Peri’s best friend, Chase, Peri will do a favor for Rae.

This promise doesn’t work out so well for Peri. Rae is murdered. Chase is suspected of committing the murder. And Rae, or her ghost, comes demanding that Peri solve the murder. Peri is not one to renege on promises, especially when scary ghosts come to collect on one of those promises.

One of the things that I liked a lot as I read was trying to solve the murder from the trail of clues left by Rhodes. Like the best mysteries, Forever Road makes it an intellectual challenge for both the main characters who are working the case and for the reader. With each clue, Peri moves a little closer to unraveling the mystery of who murdered her cousin.

And as Peri discovers the clues, shades and pieces of her character are revealed, so that we understand what makes her tick. Rhodes paints Peri with a detailed brush, so that we can hear the way she talks, envision the way she walks, and can picture the visions of dead people she sees. Rhodes also does an outstanding job creating fully-developed supporting characters, villains, and bit players who inhabit the pages of this book.

The effect Rhodes creates is a rich, fast-moving, always amusing story that will keep you enthralled from start to finish. I recommend this book very highly, and I look forward to reading more from Rhodes.

To buy a copy of Forever Road, please go here: Amazon.

Boston Marathon: Finding Joy among the Wreckage

I made this video last night to speak about how we can find happiness even when we’re sad, grieving, scared, traumatized and in pain. Please folks, instead of watching negative and scary news this evening, please watch this 11-minute video and please share it with your friends. We need to focus on counting our joys as we’re sorting through this pain we’re in–it is the joy that really can help us heal.

Finding Joy Amid Grief YouTube Video

Please share this video to help give folks can find a reason to smile today.[image error]